Abstract Ultracold atoms have attracted enormous interest recently, and Cooper pairing between fermionic alkali atoms may have been observed experimentally. Besides the demonstration of phenomena that we are acquainted with from solid state physics, ultracold atoms possibly exhibit interesting many‐body ground states that do not have straightforward counterparts in solid state physics. The hyperfine degree of freedom of the atoms in combination with optical lattices may allow for the approximate realization of fermionic SU(N) Hubbard models where N counts the number of trapped hyperfine states (‘flavors’). We analyze the ground states of this model on the two‐dimensional square lattice using one‐loop renormalization group and meanfield techniques. In the repulsive case for N > 6 and half band filling staggered flux order is found as the dominant instability, in agreement with the large‐N limit. In the attractive case and odd N a full Fermi surface coexists with a superfluid in the ground state. We describe how these unconventional paired states can be identified in the density response of the fermions. (© 2005 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)
We investigate the fermionic SU(N) Hubbard model on the two-dimensional square lattice for weak to moderate interactions using renormalization group and mean-field methods. For the repulsive case U>0 at half filling and small N the dominant tendency is towards breaking of the SU(N) symmetry. For N>6 staggered flux order takes over as the dominant instability, in agreement with the large-N limit. Away from half filling for N=3 two flavors remain half filled by cannibalizing the third flavor. For U<0 and odd N a full Fermi surface coexists with a superconductor. These results may be relevant to future experiments with cold fermionic atoms in optical lattices.
We study a two-species fermion mixture with different populations on a square lattice modeled by a Hubbard Hamiltonian with onsite interspecies repulsive interaction. Such a model can be realized in a cold-atom system with fermionic atoms in two different hyperfine states loaded on an optical lattice and with tunable interspecies interaction strength via external fields. For a two-dimensional square lattice, when at least one of the fermion species is close to half-filling, the system is highly affected by lattice effects. With the majority species near half-filling and varying densities for the minority species, we find that several correlated phases emerge as the ground state, including a spin density wave state, a charge density wave state with stripe structure, and various
p-wave BCS pairing states for both species. We study this system using a functional renormalization group method, determine its phase diagram at weak coupling, discuss the origin and characteristics of each phase, and provide estimates for the critical temperatures.
We study the phase diagram of the extended Hubbard model on a two-dimensional square lattice, including on-site (
U) and nearest-neighbor (
V) interactions, at weak couplings. We show that the charge-density wave phase that is known to occur at half filling when
4V>U gives way to a
dxy-wave superconducting instability away from half filling, when the Fermi surface is not perfectly nested, and for sufficiently large repulsive
V and a range of on-site repulsive interaction
U. In addition, when nesting is further suppressed and in the presence of a nearest-neighbor attraction, a triplet time-reversal breaking
(px+ipy)-wave pairing instability emerges, competing with the ${d}_{{x}^{2}\ensuremath{-}{y}^{2}}$ pairing state that is known to dominate at fillings just slightly away from half. At even smaller fillings, where the Fermi surface no longer presents any nesting, the
(px+ipy)-wave superconducting phase dominates in the whole regime of on-site repulsions and nearest-neighbor attractions, while
dxy pairing occurs in the presence of on-site attraction. Our results suggest that zero-energy Majorana fermions can be realized on a square lattice in the presence of a magnetic field. For a system of cold fermionic atoms on a two-dimensional square optical lattice, both an on-site repulsion and a nearest-neighbor attraction would be required, in addition to rotation of the system to create vortices. We discuss possible ways of experimentally engineering the required interaction terms in a cold atom system.
We study fermionic superfluidity in an ultracold Bose-Fermi mixture loaded into a square optical lattice subjected to a staggered flux. While the bosons form a Bose-Einstein condensate at very low temperature and weak interaction, the interacting fermions experience an additional long-ranged attractive interaction mediated by phonons in the bosonic condensate. This leads us to consider a generalized Hubbard model with on-site and nearest-neighbor attractive interactions, which give rise to two competing pairing channels. We use the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory to determine the regimes where distinct fermionic superfluids are stabilized and find that the nonlocal pairing channel favors a superfluid state which breaks both the gauge and the lattice symmetries, similar to unconventional superconductivity occurring in some strongly correlated systems. Furthermore, the particular structure of the single-particle spectrum leads to unexpected consequences, for example, a dome-shaped superfluid region in the temperature versus filing fraction phase diagram, with a normal phase that contains much richer physics than a Fermi liquid. Notably, the relevant temperature regime and coupling strength are readily accessible in state of the art experiments with ultracold trapped atoms.
Ultracold multicomponent fermions (atoms or molecules) loaded in optical lattices provide an ideal platform for simulating
SU(N) Hubbard models that host unconventional many-body quantum states beyond SU(2). A prime example is the attractive three-color Hubbard model, in which trion states emerge at strong coupling. Nevertheless, much of its trion ordering on two-dimensional lattices remains uncertain. Here, we employ the determinant quantum Monte Carlo method to simulate the attractive three-color Hubbard model on a $\ensuremath{\pi}$-flux square lattice at half filling. We show that color-dependent attractive interaction can induce the coexisting charge density wave (CDW) and N\'eel-ordered states in the three-color $\ensuremath{\pi}$-flux Hubbard model. In particular, enhanced charge fluctuations (cf. honeycomb lattice) cause much stronger N\'eel ordering on the $\ensuremath{\pi}$-flux square lattice. The coexisting charge and N\'eel orders survive up to a melting temperature, at which they vanish simultaneously. The Ginzburg-Landau (GL) analysis on the coexistence of CDW and N\'eel orders demonstrates how color-dependent Hubbard interactions stabilize coexisting orders from the perspective of GL free energy principle.