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arXiv:cond-mat/0611620 · Physical Review B

Bond algebraic liquid phase in strongly correlated multiflavor cold atom systems

Cenke Xu, Matthew P. A. Fisher

Published Mar 28, 2007• 69 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

When cold atoms are trapped in a square or cubic optical lattice, it should be possible to pump the atoms into excited $p$-level orbitals within each well. Following earlier work, we explore the metastable equilibrium that can be established before the atoms decay into the $s$-wave orbital ground state. We will discuss the situation with integer number of bosons on every site, and consider the strong correlation ``insulating'' regime. By employing a spin-wave analysis together with a duality transformation, we establish the existence and stability of a gapless ``critical phase,'' which we refer to as a ``bond algebraic liquid.'' The gapless nature of this phase is stabilized due to the emergence of symmetries which lead to a quasi-one-dimensional behavior. Within the algebraic liquid phase, both bond operators and particle flavor occupation number operators have correlations which decay algebraically in space and time. Upon varying parameters, the algebraic bond liquid can be unstable to either a Mott insulator phase which spontaneously breaks lattice symmetries, or a ${\mathbb{Z}}_{2}$ phase. The possibility of detecting the algebraic liquid phase in cold atom experiments is addressed. Although the momentum distribution function is insufficient to distinguish the algebraic bond liquid from other phases, the density correlation function can in principle be used to detect this phase of matter.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.75.104428

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When cold atoms are trapped in a square or cubic optical lattice, it should be possible to pump the atoms into excited ppp-level orbitals within each well. Following earlier work, we explore the metastable equilibrium that can be established before the atoms decay into the sss-wave orbital ground state. We will discuss the situation with integer number of bosons on every site, and consider the strong correlation insulating'' regime. By employing a spin-wave analysis together with a duality transformation, we establish the existence and stability of a gapless critical phase,'' which we refer to as a ``bond algebraic liquid.'' The gapless nature of this phase is stabilized due to the emergence of symmetries which lead to a quasi-one-dimensional behavior. Within the algebraic liquid phase, both bond operators and particle flavor occupation number operators have correlations which decay algebraically in space and time. Upon varying parameters, the algebraic bond liquid can be unstable to either a Mott insulator phase which spontaneously breaks lattice symmetries, or a Z2{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}Z2​ phase. The possibility of detecting the algebraic liquid phase in cold atom experiments is addressed. Although the momentum distribution function is insufficient to distinguish the algebraic bond liquid from other phases, the density correlation function can in principle be used to detect this phase of matter.
A quantum ground state of matter is realized in a bosonic model on a three-dimensional fcc lattice with emergent low energy excitations. The phase obtained is a stable gapless boson liquid phase, with algebraic boson density correlations. The stability of this phase is protected against the instanton effect and superfluidity by self-duality and large gauge symmetries on both sides of the duality. The gapless collective excitations of this phase closely resemble the graviton, although they have a soft $\ensuremath{\omega}\ensuremath{\sim}{k}^{2}$ dispersion relation. There are three branches of gapless excitations in this phase, one of which is gapless scalar trace mode, the other two have the same polarization and gauge symmetries as the gravitons. The dynamics of this phase is described by a set of Maxwell's equations. The defects carrying gauge charges can drive the system into the superfluid order when the defects are condensed; also the topological defects are coupled to the dual gauge field in the same manner as the charge defects couple to the original gauge field, after the condensation of the topological defects, the system is driven into the Mott insulator phase. In the two-dimensional case, the gapless soft graviton as well as the algebraic liquid phase are destroyed by the vertex operators in the dual theory, and the stripe order is most likely to take place close to the two-dimensional quantum critical point at which the vertex operators are tuned to zero.
States with gapless degrees of freedom are typically more complicated and less well- understood than systems possessing a gap. In this thesis, we study strongly-correlated systems described by gapless fermions. In most of the systems we consider, the fermionic excitations are emergent, i.e. they are not adiabatically connected to the electrons which constitute the fundamental building blocks of the system in question.\nWe start by proposing several novel states of matter which we claim are relevant to strongly-correlated systems. The rst state we present is a fractionalized Fermi liquid on the surface of a topological Kondo insulator. A Kondo insulator is a material which becomes insulating at low temperatures as a result of strong electron-spin interactions. When spin- orbit coupling is present, this insulator might be topological and, consequently, host robust gapless surface modes. Given the strong interactions and the decreased dimensionality of the surface, we propose that the spins and electrons there may decouple, resulting in the formation of a fractionalized Fermi liquid.\nWe next argue that quantum electrodynamics in 2+1 dimensions (QED3) with Nf = 4 fermion avours may describe a continuous, decon ned phase transition connecting the 120◦ coplanar Néel phase and the √12 × √12 valence bond solid phase of the triangular lattice antiferromagnet (AF). In addition to being a critical point, QED3 is also believed to describe a critical phase of matter called the Dirac spin liquid. Regardless of whether QED3 is manifest as a phase or a critical point, impurities and imperfections are always present in the real world, and it is therefore important to understand what e ects this may have. We show that when QED3 is perturbed by weak disorder, under certain circumstances, it ows to a new critical point in which both interactions and disorder are present.\nConclusively identifying a system described by QED3 has proven to be a di cult task, not only experimentally, but in numerical studies as well. Since QED3 is a critical theory, its spectrum on a torus is a universal quantity dependent only on low-energy degrees of freedom, such as the torus area. It follows that this data is accessible via exact diagonalization and can serve as an identifying signature of the theory. To this end, we calculate the QED3 torus spectrum using path integral methods.\nWe conclude this thesis with a comprehensive study of gapped Z2 spin liquids of the square lattice antiferrogmagnet, using a critical theory of Dirac fermions coupled to an SU(2) gauge eld as a starting point. There are many di erent Z2 spin liquid groundstates which preserve the same symmetry group. Even if one knows that a system has a Z2 spin liquid groundstate, it is by no means obvious which Z2 spin liquid is being realized. By starting from a gapless theory, the set of possibilities can be reduce considerably. Further, using certain recently proposed dualities, comparisons with theories formulated using bosons can be made.
In this thesis we theoretically study low-dimensional, strongly corrleated systems of cold atoms, which are not in an equilibrium situation. This is motivated by recent experimental progress, which has made it possible to study quantum many-body physics in a controllable and clean setting; and parameters can be changed during the experiment. In Chapter 2 and 3 we study phases and quantum phase transitions of ‘tilted ’ Mott insulator of bosons. We analyze a variety of lattices and tilt directions in two dimensions: square, decorated square, triangular, and kagome. We show that there are rich possibilities for correlated phases with non-trivial entanglement of pseudospin degrees of freedom encoded in the boson density. For certain configurations three-body interactions are necessary to ensure that the energy of the effective resonant subspace is bounded from below. We find quantum phases with Ising density wave order, with superfluidity transverse to the tilt direction, a quantum liquid state with no broken symmetry. We also find cases for which the resonant subspace is described by effective quantum dimer models. In Chapter 4 we study spin 1/2 chains with a Heisenberg interaction which are
We show the existence of a stable algebraic spin liquid (ASL) phase in a Hubbard model defined on a honeycomb lattice with spin-dependent hopping that breaks time-reversal symmetry. The effective spin model is the Kitaev model for large on-site repulsion. The gaplessness of the emergent Majorana fermions is protected by the time-reversal invariance of this model. We prove that the effective spin model is time-reversal invariant in the entire Mott phase, thus ensuring the stability of the ASL. The model can be physically realized in cold atom systems, and we propose experimental signals of the ASL.
In recent work, we argued that a particular algebraic spin liquid (ASL) may be the ground state of the S=1/2S=1/2S=1/2 kagome lattice Heisenberg antiferromagnet. Furthermore, this state, which lacks a spin gap, is appealing in light of recent experiments on herbertsmithite [ZnCu3(OH)6Cl2][{\text{ZnCu}}_{3}{(\text{OH})}_{6}{\text{Cl}}_{2}][ZnCu3​(OH)6​Cl2​]. Here, we study the properties of this ASL in more detail using both the low-energy effective field theory and Gutzwiller-projected wave functions of fermionic spinons. We identify the competing orders of the ASL, which are observables having slowly decaying power-law correlations---among them we find a set of magnetic orders lying at the MMM points of the Brillouin zone, the familiar $\mathbit{q}=0$ magnetic ordered state, the ``Hastings'' valence-bond solid (VBS) state, and a pattern of vector spin-chirality ordering corresponding to one of the Dzyaloshinskii--Moriya (DM) interaction terms present in herbertsmithite. Identification of some of these orders requires an understanding of the quantum numbers of magnetic monopole operators in the ASL. We discuss the detection of the magnetic and VBS competing orders in experiments. While we primarily focus on a clean system without DM interaction, we consider the effects of small DM interaction and argue that, surprisingly, it leads to spontaneously broken time-reversal symmetry (for DM interaction that preserves XYXYXY spin rotation symmetry, there is also XYXYXY magnetic order). Our analysis of the projected wave function provides an estimate of the ``Fermi velocity'' vF{v}_{F}vF​ that characterizes all low-energy excitations of the ASL---this allows us to estimate the specific heat, which compares favorably with experiments. We also study the spin and bond correlations of the projected wave function and compare these results with those of the effective field theory. While the spin correlations in the effective field theory and wave function seem to match rather well (although not completely), the bond correlations are more puzzling. We conclude with a discussion of experiments in herbertsmithite and make several predictions.
The quantum nature of electrons emerges in various exotic ways when they are put together with quantum many-body interactions. In Mott insulating systems with strong electron correlation, frustration and strong quantum fluctuations promote localized electron spins to form nontrivial quantum paramagnetic phases such as quantum spin liquid and valence bond solid preventing the development of conventional magnetic orders. In this thesis, we study such exotic quantum phases in various different frustrated quantum magnets. First, encouraged by the spin liquid phenomenology observed in Ba3XSb2O9 (X=Cu, Ni), we investigate Z2 spin liquids on a three dimensional triangular lattice by employing the Schwinger boson mean-field theory with projective symmetry group analysis. It is found that a nematic spin liquid is energetically favorable on this lattice structure rather than symmetric spin liquids. Next, we study various valence bond solid phases that can appear in kagome lattice antiferromagnets by generalizing the recently proposed phenomenological Z2 gauge theory for the topological Z2 spin liquid state found in the nearest-neighbor kagome lattice Heisenberg model. This work provides a bridge between the topological spin liquid and valence bond solid phases previously proposed for kagome lattice antiferromagnets via vison condensation in the gauge theory. Then, we consider optical conductivity in Mott insulators as an experimental probe to detect quantum paramagnetic phases like valence bond solid. Applying this idea to deformed kagome lattice antiferromagnet Rb2Cu3SnF12 with a 12-site valence bond solid state, we estimate the size of optical conductivity in this quantum magnet. After this, another quantum paramagnet BiCu2PO6 is carefully investigated to clarify its puzzling ground state nature and quasiparticle excitations. Utilizing recent high resolution neutron scattering data, we construct a microscopic spin model and also an effective theory for the low energy spin excitations in the compound. We find significant influences of magnetic anisotropies on the ground state and quasiparticle dynamics. Lastly, we investigate emergent quantum phases in the thin film geometries of the pyrochlore iridates, where a number of exotic quantum ground states are proposed to occur in bulk materials as a result of the interplay between electron correlation and strong spin-orbit coupling. The fate of these bulk phases, as well as the novel quantum states that may arise only in a thin film setting, are studied via a theoretical model that allows layer-dependent magnetic structures.