Adiabatically compressing chiral p-wave Bose-Einstein condensates into the lowest landau level

Abstract

There has been much recent progress in controlling $p$-orbital degrees of freedom in optical lattices, for example with lattice shaking, sublattice swapping, and lattice potential programming. Here, we present a protocol of preparing lowest Landau level (LLL) states of cold atoms by adiabatically compressing $p$-orbital Bose-Einstein condensates confined in two-dimensional optical lattices. The system starts from a chiral $p+ip$ Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) state, which acquires finite angular momentum by spontaneous symmetry breaking. Such chiral BEC states have been achieved in recent optical lattice experiments for cold atoms loaded in the $p$-bands. Through an adiabatic adjustment of the lattice potential, we compress the three-dimensional BEC into a two-dimensional system, in which the orbital degrees of freedom continuously morph into LLL states. This process is enforced by the discrete rotation symmetry of the lattice potential. The final quantum state inherits large angular momentum from the original chiral $p+ip$ state, with one quantized unit per particle. We investigate the quantum many-body ground state of interacting bosons in the LLL considering contact repulsion. This leads to an exotic gapped BEC state. Our theory can be readily tested in experiments for the required techniques are all accessible to the current optical lattice experiments.