The fermionic Hubbard model plays a fundamental role in the description of strongly correlated materials. We have realized this Hamiltonian in a repulsively interacting spin mixture of ultracold (40)K atoms in a three-dimensional (3D) optical lattice. Using in situ imaging and independent control of external confinement and lattice depth, we were able to directly measure the compressibility of the quantum gas in the trap. Together with a comparison to ab initio dynamical mean field theory calculations, we show how the system evolves for increasing confinement from a compressible dilute metal over a strongly interacting Fermi liquid into a band-insulating state. For strong interactions, we find evidence for an emergent incompressible Mott insulating phase. This demonstrates the potential to model interacting condensed-matter systems using ultracold fermionic atoms.
We investigate the formation and condensation of fermion pairs in cold atom quantum simulators for extended Hubbard models (UV models) with body center cubic (BCC) optical lattices, predicting small and light pairs with Bose--Einstein condensation (BEC) temperatures up to the order of 100 nK. Pair mass, radius, and binding conditions are calculated, and then used to compute transition temperatures. We predict that: (a) local pairs can form in BCC optical lattices; (b) for particular cases where the onsite
U and intersite V are attractive with similar size, the pairs are both small and light; and (c) that transition temperatures could be as high as 100 nK (50 nK) for 6Li atoms in blue (red) BCC optical lattices. Beyond the application to pairs on BCC optical lattices, we expect our results to be relevant to strong-coupling BCC superconductors.