Superfluid-Mott transition in a frustrated triangular optical lattice

Abstract

Geometric frustration can significantly increase the complexity and richness of many-body physics and, for instance, suppress antiferromagnetic order in quantum magnets. Here, we employ ultracold bosonic $^{39}$K atoms in a triangular optical lattice to study geometric frustration by stabilizing the gas at the frustrated upper band edge using negative absolute temperatures. We find that geometric frustration suppresses the critical interaction strength for the (chiral-)superfluid to Mott insulator ($\chi$-SF-MI) quantum phase transition by a factor of 2.7(3) and furthermore changes the critical dynamics of the transition. Although the emergence of coherence during fast ramps from MI to the ($\chi$-)SF regime is continuous in both cases, for ramps longer than a few tunnelling times, significant differences emerge. In the \frs case, no long-range order emerges on the studied timescales, highlighting a significantly reduced rate or even saturation of the emerging coherence. This work opens the door to quantum simulations of frustrated systems that are often intractable by classical simulations.