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arXiv:cond-mat/0607718 · New Journal of Physics

Magnetism and Hund's rule in an optical lattice with cold fermions

K Kärkkäinen, Magnus O. Borgh, M. Manninen, S. M. Reimann

Published Feb 21, 2007• 7 citations
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Abstract

We demonstrate that a two-dimensional (2D) optical lattice loaded with repulsive, contact-interacting fermions shows a rich and systematic magnetic phase diagram. Trapping a few ( N ⩽ 12) fermions in each of the single-site minima of the optical lattice, we find that the shell structure in these quantum wells determines the magnetism. In a shallow lattice, the tunnelling between the single wells is strong, and the lattice is non-magnetic (NM). For deeper lattices, however, the shell filling of the single wells with fermionic atoms determines the magnetism. As a consequence of Hund's first rule, the interaction energy is lowered by maximizing the number of atoms of the same species. This leads to a systematic sequence of NM, ferromagnetic (F) and antiferromagnetic (AF) phases.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/9/2/033

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We demonstrate that a two-dimensional (2D) optical lattice loaded with repulsive, contact-interacting fermions shows a rich and systematic magnetic phase diagram. Trapping a few ( N ⩽ 12) fermions in each of the single-site minima of the optical lattice, we find that the shell structure in these quantum wells determines the magnetism. In a shallow lattice, the tunnelling between the single wells is strong, and the lattice is non-magnetic (NM). For deeper lattices, however, the shell filling of the single wells with fermionic atoms determines the magnetism. As a consequence of Hund's first rule, the interaction energy is lowered by maximizing the number of atoms of the same species. This leads to a systematic sequence of NM, ferromagnetic (F) and antiferromagnetic (AF) phases.
We examine antiferromagnetic and ddd-wave superfluid phases of cold fermionic atoms with repulsive interactions in a two-dimensional optical lattice combined with a harmonic trapping potential. For experimentally realistic parameters, the trapping potential leads to the coexistence of magnetic and superfluid ordered phases with the normal phase. We study the intriguing shell structures arising from the competition between the magnetic and superfluid order as a function of the filling fraction. In certain cases, antiferromagnetism induces superfluidity by charge redistributions. We furthermore demonstrate how these shell structures can be detected as distinct antibunching dips and pairing peaks in the density-density correlation function probed in expansion experiments.
We study a model of an equal mixture of two species of fermions in a deep optical lattice at a filling of two fermions per site. At weak interspecies interaction, the system is a band insulator. When the interspecies interaction is tuned via a Feshbach resonance to be larger than an energy related to the energy separation of the first and second Bloch bands, atoms populate equally the two Bloch bands. With weak tunneling between sites of the optical lattice, the system becomes a Mott insulator with the low-energy effective Hamiltonian of a spin-1 Heisenberg antiferromagnet, because of a Hund's-rule-like coupling between the two bands. We discuss experimental signatures of these two types of insulators.
We study Hubbard models for ultracold bosonic or fermionic atoms loaded into an optical lattice. The atoms carry a high spin F> 1/2, and interact on site via strong repulsive Van der Waals forces. Making convenient rearrangements of the interaction terms, and exploiting their symmetry properties, we derive low-energy effective models with nearest-neighbor interactions, and their properties. We apply our method to F =3/2, and 5/2 fermions on two-dimensional square lattice at quarter, and 1/6 fillings, respectively, and investigate mean-field equations for repulsive couplings. We find for F =3/2 fermions that the plaquette state appearing in the highly symmetric SU (4) case does not require fine tuning, and is stable in an extended region of the phase diagram. This phase competes with an SU (2) flux state, that is always suppressed for repulsive interactions in the absence of external magnetic field. The SU (2) flux state has, however, lower energy than the plaquette phase, and stabilizes in the presence of weak applied magnetic field. For F =5/2 fermions a similar SU (2) plaquette phase is found to be the ground state without external magnetic field.
We theoretically investigate, using non-perturbative strong correlation techniques, Mott insulating phases and magnetic ordering of two-component fermions in a two-dimensional double-well optical lattice. At filling of two fermions per site, there are two types of Mott insulators, one of which is characterized by spin-1 antiferromagnetism below the Neel temperature. The super-exchange interaction in this system is induced by the interplay between the inter-band interaction and the spin degree of freedom. A great advantage of the double-well optical lattice is that the magnetic quantum phase diagram and the Neel temperature can be easily controlled by tuning the orbital energy splitting of the two-level system. Particularly, the Neel temperature can be one order of magnitude larger than that in standard optical lattices, facilitating the experimental search for magnetic ordering in optical lattice systems.
A broad class of correlated quantum materials features strong Hund’s coupling, yet cold-atom quantum simulators have so far focused primarily on single-orbital Fermi-Hubbard systems near a Mott insulator. Here, we show that repulsively interacting fermions loaded into the p bands of a hexagonal lattice offer a unique platform to study the interplay of “Hundness” and “Mottness.” Our theory predicts that the orbital degrees of freedom, despite geometric frustration, produce a rich phase diagram featuring a competing itinerant ferromagnetic (FM) metal and a spin-1 antiferromagnetic (AFM) insulator. While FM order is known to emerge at low fillings near the flat-band limit, we show that this itinerant ferromagnetism is remarkably robust, persisting to stronger interactions and higher fillings well beyond the flat-band regime. More importantly, we identify that near half filling, FM is stabilized by a different mechanism: the double exchange with spins aligning to avoid Hund-rule penalties at the expense of the kinetic energy of Dirac fermions. The competition between the kinetic and double-exchange energies leads to, within our approximations, a first-order transition between FM and AFM orders in the chemical potential-interaction strength plane. Our analysis suggests that p -orbital Fermi gases—as multiorbital systems with coexisting localized and itinerant spins—reveal a rich competition between correlated “Hund metals” and other unconventional states driven by quantum fluctuations.