Systems with competing orders are of great interest in condensed matter physics. When\ntwo phases have comparable energies, novel interplay effects such can be induced by tuning an appropriate parameter. In this thesis, we study two problems of competing orders - (i) ultracold atom gases with competing superfluidity and Charge Density Wave(CDW) orders, and (ii) low dimensional antiferromagnets with Neel order competing against various disordered ground states. \n\nIn the first part of the thesis, we study the\n attractive Hubbard model which could soon be realized in ultracold atom experiments. Close to half-filling, the superfluid ground state competes with a low-lying CDW phase. We study the collective excitations of the superfluid using the Generalized Random Phase Approximation (GRPA) and strong-coupling spin wave analysis.\n The competing CDW phase manifests as a roton-like excitation. We characterize the collective mode spectrum, setting benchmarks for experiments.\n\nWe drive competition between orders by imposing superfluid flow. Superflow leads to various instabilities: in particular, we find a dynamical instability associated with CDW order. We also find a novel dynamical incommensurate instability analogous to exciton condensation in semiconductors.\n\nIn the second part, inspired by experiments on Bi3Mn4O12(NO3)(BMNO), we first study the interlayer dimer state in spin-S bilayer antiferromagnets. At a critical bilayer coupling strength, condensation of triplet excitations leads to Neel order. In describing this transition, bond operator mean field theory suffers from systematic deviations. We bridge these deviations by taking into account corrections arising from higher spin excitations. The interlayer dimer state shows a field induced Neel transition, as seen in BMNO. Our results are relevant to the quantitative modelling of spin-S dimerized systems. \n\nWe then study the J1−J2 model on the honeycomb lattice with frustrating next-nearest neighbour exchange.\n For J2>J1/6, quantum and thermal fluctuations lead to ‘lattice nematic’\nstates. For S=1/2, this lattice nematic takes the form of a valence bond solid.\n\nWith J2<J1 /6, quantum fluctuations melt Neel order so as to give rise to a field induced Neel transition. This scenario can explain the observed properties of BMNO.\n\nWe discuss implications for the honeycomb lattice Hubbard model.
Systems with competing orders are of great interest in condensed matter physics. When\ntwo phases have comparable energies, novel interplay effects such can be induced by tuning an appropriate parameter. In this thesis, we study two problems of competing orders - (i) ultracold atom gases with competing superfluidity and Charge Density Wave(CDW) orders, and (ii) low dimensional antiferromagnets with Neel order competing against various disordered ground states. \n\nIn the first part of the thesis, we study the\n attractive Hubbard model which could soon be realized in ultracold atom experiments. Close to half-filling, the superfluid ground state competes with a low-lying CDW phase. We study the collective excitations of the superfluid using the Generalized Random Phase Approximation (GRPA) and strong-coupling spin wave analysis.\n The competing CDW phase manifests as a roton-like excitation. We characterize the collective mode spectrum, setting benchmarks for experiments.\n\nWe drive competition between orders by imposing superfluid flow. Superflow leads to various instabilities: in particular, we find a dynamical instability associated with CDW order. We also find a novel dynamical incommensurate instability analogous to exciton condensation in semiconductors.\n\nIn the second part, inspired by experiments on Bi3Mn4O12(NO3)(BMNO), we first study the interlayer dimer state in spin-S bilayer antiferromagnets. At a critical bilayer coupling strength, condensation of triplet excitations leads to Neel order. In describing this transition, bond operator mean field theory suffers from systematic deviations. We bridge these deviations by taking into account corrections arising from higher spin excitations. The interlayer dimer state shows a field induced Neel transition, as seen in BMNO. Our results are relevant to the quantitative modelling of spin-S dimerized systems. \n\nWe then study the J1−J2 model on the honeycomb lattice with frustrating next-nearest neighbour exchange.\n For J2>J1/6, quantum and thermal fluctuations lead to ‘lattice nematic’\nstates. For S=1/2, this lattice nematic takes the form of a valence bond solid.\n\nWith J2<J1 /6, quantum fluctuations melt Neel order so as to give rise to a field induced Neel transition. This scenario can explain the observed properties of BMNO.\n\nWe discuss implications for the honeycomb lattice Hubbard model.
We study the superfluid phase of the one-band attractive Hubbard model of fermions as a prototype of a strongly correlated s-wave fermion superfluid on a lattice. We show that the collective mode spectrum of this superfluid exhibits, in addition to the long wavelength sound mode, a sharp roton mode over a wide range of densities and interaction strengths. We compute the sound velocity and the roton gap within a generalized random phase approximation (GRPA) and show that the GRPA results are in good agreement, at strong coupling, with a spin-wave analysis of the appropriate strong-coupling pseudospin model. We also investigate, using this two-pronged approach, the breakdown of superfluidity in the presence of a supercurrent. We find that the superflow can break down at a critical flow momentum via several distinct mechanisms---depairing, Landau instabilities or dynamical instabilities---depending on the dimension, the interaction strength and the fermion density. The most interesting of these instabilities is a charge modulation dynamical instability which is distinct from previously studied dynamical instabilities of Bose superfluids. The charge order associated with this instability can be of two types: (i) a commensurate checkerboard modulation driven by softening of the roton mode at the Brillouin zone corner, or, (ii) an incommensurate density modulation arising from superflow-induced finite momentum pairing of Bogoliubov quasiparticles. We elucidate the dynamical phase diagram showing the critical flow momentum of the leading instability over a wide range of fermion densities and interaction strengths and point out implications of our results for experiments on cold atom fermion superfluids in an optical lattice.
In this thesis, we investigate strongly correlated phenomena in quantum spin systems. In the first part of this work, we study geometrically frustrated antiferromagnets (AFMs). Generalizing the SU(2) Heisenberg Hamiltonian to Sp(N) symmetry, we obtain, in the large-N limit, the mean-field phase diagrams for the planar pyrochlore and cubic AFMs. We then use gauge theories to consider fluctuation effects about their respective mean-field configurations. We find, in addition to conventional Neel states, a plethora of novel magnetically disordered phases: two kinds of spin liquids, Z2 in 2+1D and U(1)in 3+1D, and several valence bond solids such as two and three-dimensional plaquette and columnar singlet states. We use the same approach to study the diamond lattice AFM which possesses extended classical ground state degeneracy. We demonstrate that quantum and entropic fluctuations lift this degeneracy in different ways. In the second part of the thesis, we study ultracold spinor atoms confined in optical lattices. We first demonstrate the feasibility of experimental realization of rotor models using ultracold spin-one Bose atoms in a spin-dependent and disordered optical lattice. We show that the ground state of such disordered rotor models with quadrupolar interactions can exhibit biaxial nematic ordering in the disorder-averaged sense, and suggest an imaging experiment to detect the biaxial nematicity in such systems. Finally, using variational wavefunction methods, we study the Mott phases and superfluid-insulator transition of spin-three bosons in an optical lattice with an anisotropic two dimensional optical trap. We chart out the phase diagrams for Mott states with n = 1 and n = 2 atoms per lattice site. We show that the long-range dipolar interaction stabilizes a state characterized by antiferromagnetic chains made of ferromagnetically aligned spins. We also obtain the mean-field phase boundary for the superfluid-insulator transition, and show that inside the superfluid phase and near the superfluid-insulator phase boundary, the system undergoes a first order antiferromagnetic-ferromagnetic spin ordering transition.
In optical lattices attractive ultracold fermions with three hyperfine-spin components (colors) can form three fermionic configurations depending on the interactions---unbound fermions, on-site trions, and off-site trions---leading to the coexistence of multiple fermionic species in the ordered phase, which demonstrates that the attractive three-color fermions are unique from other correlated fermion systems and may host intriguing phases and phase transitions. At temperatures below the superexchange energy scale, we employ the determinant quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) method to investigate the phases and phase transitions in the half-filled attractive three-color Hubbard model on a honeycomb lattice where the Hubbard interactions are color dependent (anisotropic interactions) and the coupling between color 3 and colors (1, 2) serves as a control parameter. In the coupling regime where on-site and off-site trions coexist, our QMC simulations demonstrate coexisting N\'eel and charge density wave (CDW) orders which are common in condensed matter but rare in ultracold atoms. At weak coupling where the color superfluid (CSF) order is scattered by color-3 fermions, we find that very small coupling of color 3 with colors (1, 2) can destroy the CSF order and that the vanishing of the CSF order is not immediately accompanied by the emergence of the on-site trionic phase, which strikingly disagrees with the prevalent results of dynamical mean-field theory. The underlying mechanisms of the coexisting N\'eel/CDW orders and of the CSF order breaking are also presented based on intuitive physical pictures.
We study the phases of doped spin S=1/2 quantum antiferromagnets on the square lattice, as they evolve from paramagnetic Mott insulators with valence bond solid (VBS) order at zero doping, to superconductors at moderate doping. The interplay between density wave/VBS order and superconductivity is efficiently described by the quantum dimer model, which acts as an effective theory for the total spin S=0 sector. We extend the dimer model to include fermionic S=1/2 excitations, and show that its mean-field, static gauge field saddle points have projective symmetries (PSGs) similar to those of `slave' particle U(1) and SU(2) gauge theories. We account for the non-perturbative effects of gauge fluctuations by a duality mapping of the S=0 dimer model. The dual theory of vortices has a PSG identical to that found in a previous paper (L. Balents et al., cond-mat/0408329) by a duality analysis of bosons on the square lattice. The previous theory therefore also describes fluctuations across superconducting, supersolid and Mott insulating phases of the present electronic model. Finally, with the aim of describing neutron scattering experiments, we present a phenomenological model for collective S=1 excitations and their coupling to superflow and density wave fluctuations.
The progress of ultracold atoms renders numerous possibilities to investigate exotic magnetism and superfluidity, which are rarely observed in solid state systems. In this thesis, we will introduce two novel physical descriptions: "frustrated Cooper pairing" and "large-hyperfine spin physics". Geometric frustration in quantum magnetism refers to which magnetic interactions on different bonds cannot be simultaneously minimized, and usually Cooper pairing favors uniform phases among different lattice sites. Here, we introduce "frustration" in Cooper pairing in a fermionic p-orbital model. By mean- field calculations, we show that the system exhibits behavior analogous to frustrated magnetism, and an unconventional supersolid state with the f-wave symmetry. Next, we introduce large-spin physics. In usual condensed matter systems, large spin is not intriguing because large values of spin suppress quantum fluctuations. In contrast, in ultracold fermion systems, large-hyperfine spin enhances quantum fluctuations and brings exotic quantum magnetism. Here the simplest large-spin fermionic system, a spin-3/2 exchange system is proposed, which can be characterized by an Sp(4)/SO(5) symmetry. In one dimension, the ground states exhibit either a dimerized state with a finite spin gap or a gapless spin liquid state by means of the density matrix renormalization group method. In the latter case, the spin-spin correlation functions are identified to have 4-site periodicities, which behaves similarly to the SU(4) chain. In two dimension, we infer that there exist three competing phases: Neel ordering, columnar dimerization and 2 x 2 plaquette formation, in the thermodynamic limit by exact diagonalization calculation on small sizes. Finally we perform the projector Quantum Monte Carlo method to study another large-spin system: the half-filled SU(N) Hubbard model. We show that at half-filling there is no sign problem such that our simulations are accurate. By finite size scaling, it is clearly found that the magnetic Neel ordering can exist not only for N = 2 but also in the N = 4 case at strong interactions. For N ̲> 6 or N = 4 at small U, the numerical results do not have any prominent signal that the long-range ordering exists in the thermodynamic limit. Due to strong finite size effects and finite numerical accuracy, however, we are unable to make any conclusion to identify the physics in the regimes
In this thesis we apply recently developed, as well as sophisticated quantum Monte Carlo methods to numerically investigate models of strongly correlated electron systems on honeycomb structures. The latter are of particular interest owing to their unique properties when simulating electrons on them, like the relativistic dispersion, strong quantum fluctuations and their resistance against instabilities. This work covers several projects including the advancement of the weak-coupling continuous time quantum Monte Carlo and its application to zero temperature and phonons, quantum phase transitions of valence bond solids in spin-1/2 Heisenberg systems using projector quantum Monte Carlo in the valence bond basis, and the magnetic field induced transition to a canted antiferromagnet of the Hubbard model on the honeycomb lattice. The emphasis lies on two projects investigating the phase diagram of the SU(2) and the SU(N)-symmetric Hubbard model on the hexagonal lattice. At sufficiently low temperatures, condensed-matter systems tend to develop order. An exception are quantum spin-liquids, where fluctuations prevent a transition to an ordered state down to the lowest temperatures. Previously elusive in experimentally relevant microscopic two-dimensional models, we show by means of large-scale quantum Monte Carlo simulations of the SU(2) Hubbard model on the honeycomb lattice, that a quantum spin-liquid emerges between the state described by massless Dirac fermions and an antiferromagnetically ordered Mott insulator. This unexpected quantum-disordered state is found to be a short-range resonating valence bond liquid, akin to the one proposed for high temperature superconductors. Inspired by the rich phase diagrams of SU(N) models we study the SU(N)-symmetric Hubbard Heisenberg quantum antiferromagnet on the honeycomb lattice to investigate the reliability of 1/N corrections to large-N results by means of numerically exact QMC simulations. We study the melting of phases as correlations increase with decreasing N and determine whether the quantum spin liquid found in the SU(2) Hubbard model at intermediate coupling is a specific feature, or also exists in the unconstrained t-J model and higher symmetries.