We present an ab initio, numerically exact study of attractive fermions in square lattices with Rashba spin-orbit coupling. The ground state of this system is a supersolid, with coexisting charge and superfluid order. The superfluid is composed of both singlet and triplet pairs induced by spin-orbit coupling. We perform large-scale calculations using the auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo method to provide the first full, quantitative description of the charge, spin, and pairing properties of the system. In addition to characterizing the exotic physics, our results will serve as essential high-accuracy benchmarks for the intense theoretical and especially experimental efforts in ultracold atoms to realize and understand an expanding variety of quantum Hall and topological superconductor systems.
We present an ab initio, numerically exact study of attractive fermions in square lattices with Rashba spin-orbit coupling. The ground state of this system is a supersolid, with coexisting charge and superfluid order. The superfluid is composed of both singlet and triplet pairs induced by spin-orbit coupling. We perform large-scale calculations using the auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo method to provide the first full, quantitative description of the charge, spin, and pairing properties of the system. In addition to characterizing the exotic physics, our results will serve as essential high-accuracy benchmarks for the intense theoretical and especially experimental efforts in ultracold atoms to realize and understand an expanding variety of quantum Hall and topological superconductor systems.
Strongly interacting many-body systems remain a central challenge of modern physics. Recent developments in the field of ultra-cold atomic physics have opened a new window onto this enduring problem. Experimental progress has revolutionized the approach to studying many-body systems and the exotic behaviors that emerge in these systems. It is now possible to engineer and directly measure a variety of models that can capture the essential features of real materials without the added complexity of disorder, impurities, or complicated or irregular geometries. The parameters of these models can be freely tuned with tremendous precision. These experimental realizations are an ideal setting in which to test and calibrate computational many-body methods that can provide insight and quantitative understanding to many of the open questions in condensed matter and many-body physics. in this thesis we study several models of strongly interacting many-fermion systems using cutting-edge numerical techniques including Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) mean-field theory and auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC). We explore the exotic phases and behaviors that emerge in these systems, beginning with finite-momentum pairing states in attractive spin-polarized fermions. We next demonstrate the unique capability of AFQMC to treat systems with spin-orbit coupling (SOC). We obtain high-precision, and in many cases numerically exact, results on SOC systems that can eventually be compared directly to experiment. The first system we highlight is the attractive Fermi gas with Rashba SOC, which displays unconventional pairing, charge, and spin properties. We then study the coexistence of charge and superfluid order, as well as topological signatures, in attractive lattice fermions with Rashba SOC. Our results provide a new, high-accuracy understanding of a strongly interacting many-body system and its exotic behaviors. These techniques can serve as a general framework for the treatment of strong interactions and SOC in many-body systems, and provide a foundation for future work on exotic phases in models and real materials.
The admixture of spin-singlet and spin-triplet pairing states in superconductors can be typically induced by breaking spatial inversion symmetry. Employing the numerically exact auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo method, we study such mixed-parity pairing phenomena of attractive fermions with Rashba spin-orbit coupling (SOC) in a two-dimensional optical lattice at finite temperature. We systematically explore the evolution of the essential pairing structure in both singlet and triplet channels versus the temperature, fermion filling, and SOC and interaction strengths, via computing the finite-size results of the condensate fraction and pair wave function. Our numerical results reveal that the singlet channel dominates in the fermion pairing and the triplet pairing has a relatively small contribution to the superfluidity for physically relevant parameters. In contrast to the singlet channel mainly consisting of the on-site Cooper pairs, the triplet pairing has plentiful patterns in real space with the largest contributions from several nearest neighbors. As the SOC strength increases, the pairing correlation is first enhanced and then suppressed for triplet pairing while it is simply weakened in the singlet channel. We have also obtained the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition temperatures through the finite-size analysis of the condensate fraction. Our results can serve as a quantitative guide for future optical lattice experiments as well as accurate benchmarks for theories and other numerical methods.
The realization of spin-orbit coupling (SOC) in ultracold atoms has triggered an intensive exploring of topological superfluids in the degenerate Fermi gases based on mean-field theory, which has not yet been reported in experiments. Here, we demonstrate the topological phase transitions in the system via the numerically exact quantum Monte Carlo method. Without prior assumptions, our unbiased real-space calculation shows that spin-orbit coupling can stabilize an unconventional pairing in the weak SOC regime, in which the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov pairing coexists with the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer pairing. Furthermore, we use the jumps in the spin polarization at the time-reversal invariant momenta to qualify the topological phase transition, where we find the critical exponent deviated from the mean-field theory. Our results pave the way for the searching of unconventional pairing and topological superfluids with degenerate Fermi gases.
The recent experimental realization of spin-orbit coupled Fermi gases provides a unique opportunity to study the interplay between strong interaction and spin-orbit coupling (SOC) in a tunable, disorder-free system. We present here precision ab initio numerical results on the two-dimensional, unpolarized, uniform Fermi gas with attractive interactions and Rashba SOC. Using the auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo method and incorporating recent algorithmic advances, we carry out exact calculations on sufficiently large system sizes to provide accurate results systematically as a function of experimental parameters. We obtain the equation of state, the momentum distributions, the pseudospin correlations, and the pair wave functions. Our results help illuminate the rich pairing structure induced by SOC, and provide benchmarks for theory and guidance to future experimental efforts.
The recent experimental realization of the half-filled three-color Fermi-Hubbard model on a square optical lattice provides a novel platform for exploring exotic states of matter beyond conventional SU(2) systems. In this Letter, we investigate the three-color Fermi-Hubbard model with color-dependent attractive interactions using determinant quantum Monte Carlo simulations. We find that, at quantum degenerate temperatures, a lattice Fermi supersolid state emerges from the interplay between a moderately-to-strongly interacting two-color subsystem and a weakly coupled third-color environment. This supersolid state, characterized by the coexistence of charge-density-wave and color-superfluid orders, is highly promising for experimental detection with current techniques. Our results demonstrate that the attractive three-color Fermi-Hubbard model on a square optical lattice offers an experimentally accessible system for exploring the supersolidity of ultracold lattice fermions, requiring only a simple lattice geometry and easily tunable onsite interactions.
We study the system of attractively interacting fermions hopping in a square lattice with any linear combinations of Rashba or Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling in a normal Zeeman field. By imposing self-consistence equations at half filling with zero chemical potential, we find that there are three phases: band insulator (BI), superfluid (SF), and topological superfluid (TSF) with a Chern number C=2. The C=2 TSF happens in small Zeeman fields and weak interactions which is in the experimentally most easily accessible regime. The transition from the BI to the SF is a first-order one due to the multiminima structure of the ground state energy landscape. There is a class of topological phase transitions (TPTs) from the SF to the C=2 TSF at the low critical field hc1, then another one from the C=2 TSF to the BI at the upper critical field hc2. We derive effective actions to describe these two classes of topological phase transitions, then use them to study the Majorana edge modes and the zero modes inside the vortex core of the C=2 TSF near both hc1 and hc2, especially exploring their spatial and spin structures. We find that the edge modes decay into the bulk with oscillating behaviors and determine both the decay and oscillating lengths. We compute the bulk spectra and map out the Berry curvature distribution in momentum space near both hc1 and hc2. We elaborate some intriguing bulk-Berry curvature-edge-vortex correspondences. We also discuss the competitions between SFs and charge density wave states in more general cases. A possible classification scheme of all the TPTs in a square lattice is outlined. Comparisons with previous works on related systems are discussed. Possible experimental implications in cold atoms in an optical lattice are given.