We propose an experimental scheme to simulate the fractionalization of the particle number by using a one-dimensional spin-orbit-coupled ultracold fermionic gas. The desired spin-orbit coupling, a kinklike potential, and a conjugation-symmetry-breaking mass term are properly constructed by laser-atom interactions, leading to an effective low-energy relativistic Dirac Hamiltonian with a topologically nontrivial background field. The designed system supports a localized soliton excitation with a fractional particle number that is generally irrational and experimentally tunable, providing a direct realization of the celebrated generalized Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model. In addition, we elaborate on how to detect the induced soliton mode with the fractional particle number in the system.
Discrete spacetime symmetries of parity P or reflection R, and time-reversal T, act naively as
Z2-involutions in the passive transformation on the spacetime coordinates; but together with a charge conjugation C, the total C-P-R-T symmetries have enriched active transformations on fields in representations of the spacetime-internal symmetry groups of quantum field theories (QFTs). In this work, we derive that these symmetries can be further fractionalized, especially in the presence of the fermion parity
(−1)F. We elaborate on examples including relativistic Lorentz invariant QFTs (e.g., spin-1/2 Dirac or Majorana spinor fermion theories) and nonrelativistic quantum many-body systems (involving Majorana zero modes), and comment on applications to spin-1 Maxwell electromagnetism (QED) or interacting Yang-Mills (QCD) gauge theories. We discover various C-P-R-T-
(−1)F group structures, e.g., Dirac spinor is in a projective representation of
Z2C×Z2P×Z2T but in an (anti)linear representation of an order-16 nonabelian finite group, as the central product between an order-8 dihedral (generated by C and P) or quaternion group and an order-4 group generated by T with T
2=(−1)F. The general theme may be coined as C-P-T or C-R-T fractionalization.
There has been significant interest in recent years in finding fractional quantum Hall physics in lattice models, but it is not always clear how these models connect to the corresponding models in continuum systems. Here we introduce a family of models that is able to interpolate between a recently proposed set of lattice models with Laughlin-like ground states constructed from conformal field theory and models with ground states that are practically the usual bosonic/fermionic Laughlin states in the continuum. Both the ground state and the Hamiltonian are known analytically, and we find that the Hamiltonian in the continuum limit does not coincide with the usual delta interaction Hamiltonian for the Laughlin states. We introduce quasiholes into the models and show analytically that their braiding properties are as expected if the quasiholes are screened. We demonstrate screening numerically for the 1/3 Laughlin model and find that the quasiholes are slightly smaller in the continuum than in the lattice. Finally, we compute the effective magnetic field felt by the quasiholes and show that it is close to uniform when approaching the continuum limit. The techniques presented here to interpolate between the lattice and the continuum can also be applied to other fractional quantum Hall states that are constructed from conformal field theory.