arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Erich J. Mueller.
Experiments on graphene bilayers, where the top layer is rotated with respect to the one below, have displayed insulating behavior when the moiré bands are partially filled. We calculate the charge distributions in these phases, and estimate the excitation gaps.
We use kinetic theory to model the dynamics of a small Bose condensed cloud of heavy particles moving through a larger degenerate Fermi gas of light particles. Varying the Bose-Fermi interaction, we find a crossover between bulk and surface dominated regimes -- where scattering occurs throughout the Bose cloud, or solely on the surface. We calculate the damping and frequency shift of the dipole mode in a harmonic trap as a function of the magnetic field controlling an inter-species Feshbach resonance. We find excellent agreement between our stochastic model and the experimental studies of Cs-Li mixtures.
Motivated by recent experiments, we explore the kinetics of Bose-Einstein condensation in the upper band of a double well optical lattice. These experiments engineer a non-equilibrium situation in which the highest energy state in the band is macroscopically occupied. The system subsequently relaxes and the condensate moves to the lowest energy state. We model this process, finding that the kinetics occurs in three phases: The condensate first evaporates, forming a highly non-equilibrium gas with no phase coherence. Energy is then redistributed among the noncondensed atoms. Finally the atoms recondense. We calculate the time-scales for each of these phases, and explain how this scenario can be verified through future experiments.
We propose an experimental protocol for using cold atoms to create and probe quantum dimer models, thereby exploring the Pauling-Anderson vision of a macroscopic collection of resonating bonds. This process can allow the study of exotic crystalline phases, fractionalization, topological spin liquids, and the relationship between resonating dimers and superconductivity subjects which have been challenging to address in solid-state experiments. Our key technical development is considering the action of an off-resonant photoassociation laser on large spin atoms localized at the sites of a deep optical lattice. The resulting superexchange interaction favors nearest-neighbor singlets. We derive an effective Hamiltonian in terms of these dimer degrees of freedom, finding that it is similar to well-known quantum dimer models, which boast a rich variety of valence bond crystal and spin liquid phases. We numerically study the ground state, explain how to tune the parameters, and develop a protocol to directly measure the dimers and their resonating patterns.
Motivated by recent experiments, we model the dynamics of bright solitons formed by cold gases in quasi-1D traps. A dynamical variational ansatz captures the far-from equilibrium excitations of these solitons. Due to a separation of scales, the radial and axial modes decouple, allowing for closed-form approximations for the dynamics. We explore how soliton dynamics influence atom loss, and find that the time-averaged loss is largely insensitive to the degree of excitation. The variational approach enables us to perform high precision calculations of the critical atom number (ie. the maximum number of atoms that can exist in a single soliton before the attractive forces overwhelm quantum pressure, leading to collapse).
We present an algorithm for manipulating quantum information via a sequence of projective measurements. We frame this manipulation in the language of stabilizer codes: a quantum computation approach in which errors are prevented and corrected in part by repeatedly measuring redundant degrees of freedom. We show how to construct a set of projective measurements which will map between two arbitrary stabilizer codes. We show that this process preserves all quantum information. It can be used to implement Clifford gates, braid extrinsic defects, or move between codes in which different operations are natural.
We model the superfluid to Mott insulator transition for a Bose gas on a lattice with two inequivalent sublattices. Using the Gutzwiller ansatz, we produce phase diagrams and provide an understanding of the interplay between superfluidity on each sublattice. We explore how the Mott lobes split, and describe the experimental signatures.
We present and analyze a protocol in which polaritons in a noncoplanar optical cavity form fractional quantum Hall states. We model the formation of these states and present techniques for subsequently creating anyons and measuring their fractional exchange statistics. In this protocol, we use a rapid adiabatic passage scheme to sequentially add polaritons to the system, such that the system is coherently driven from $n$- to $(n+1)$-particle Laughlin states. Quasiholes are created by slowly moving local pinning potentials in from outside the cloud. They are braided by dragging the pinning centers around one another, and the resulting phases are measured interferometrically. The most technically challenging issue with implementing our procedure is that maintaining adiabaticity and coherence requires that the two-particle interaction energy $V_0$ be sufficiently large compared to the single-polariton decay rate $γ$, $V_0 /γ\gg 10 N^2 \ln N$, where $N$ is the number of particles in the target state. While this condition is very demanding for present-day experiments where $V_0 /γ\sim 50$, our protocol presents a significant advance over the existing protocols in the literature.
We analyze an experimentally realizable model of bosons in a zig-zag optical lattice, showing that by rapidly modulating the magnetic field one can tune interaction parameters and realize an analog of the Haldane phase. We explain how quantum gas microscopy can be used to detect this phase's non-local string order and its topological edge states. We model the detection process. We also find that this model can display supersolid correlations, but argue that they only occur at parameter values which would be challenging to realize in an experiment.
We characterize the collective modes of a soliton train in a quasi-one-dimensional Fermi superfluid, using a mean-field formalism. In addition to the expected Goldstone and Higgs modes, we find novel long-lived gapped modes associated with oscillations of the soliton cores. The soliton train has an instability that depends strongly on the interaction strength and the spacing of solitons. It can be stabilized by filling each soliton with an unpaired fermion, thus forming a commensurate Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) phase. We find that such a state is always dynamically stable, which paves the way for realizing long-lived FFLO states in experiments via phase imprinting.
We propose a two-step experimental protocol to directly engineer Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) states in a cold two-component Fermi gas loaded into a quasi-one-dimensional trap. First, one uses phase imprinting to create a train of domain walls in a superfluid with equal number of $\uparrow$- and $\downarrow$-spins. Second, one applies a radio-frequency sweep to selectively break Cooper pairs near the domain walls and transfer the $\uparrow$-spins to a third spin state which does not interact with the $\uparrow$- and $\downarrow$-spins. The resulting FFLO state has exactly one unpaired $\downarrow$-spin in each domain wall and is stable for all values of domain-wall separation and interaction strength. We show that the protocol can be implemented with high fidelity at sufficiently strong interactions for a wide range of parameters available in present-day experimental conditions.
We use the time-dependent Bogoliubov de Gennes equations to study dark solitons in three-dimensional spin-imbalanced superfluid Fermi gases. We explore how the shape and dynamics of dark solitons are altered by the presence of excess unpaired spins which fill their low-density core. The unpaired particles broaden the solitons and suppress the transverse snake instability. We discuss ways of observing these phenomena in cold atom experiments.
We study the dynamics of entropy in a time dependent potential and explore how disorder influences this entropy flow. We show that disorder can trap entropy at the edge of the atomic cloud enabling a novel cooling method. We demonstrate the feasibility of our cooling technique by analyzing the evolution of entropy in a one-dimensional Fermi lattice gas with a time dependent superlattice potential.
A central challenge in modern condensed matter physics is developing the tools for understanding nontrivial yet unordered states of matter. One important idea to emerge in this context is that of a "pseudogap": the fact that under appropriate circumstances the normal state displays a suppression of the single particle spectral density near the Fermi level, reminiscent of the gaps seen in ordered states of matter. While these concepts arose in a solid state context, it is now being explored in cold gases. This article reviews the current experimental and theoretical understanding of the normal state of strongly interacting Fermi gases, with particular focus on the phenomonology which is traditionally associated with the pseudogap.
We theoretically study the Hall response of a lattice system following a quench where the topology of a filled band is suddenly changed. In the limit where the physics is dominated by a single Dirac cone, we find that the change in the Hall conductivity is two-thirds of the quantum of conductivity. We explore this universal behavior in the Haldane model, and discuss cold-atom experiments for its observation. Beyond linear response, the Hall effect crosses over from fractional to integer values. We investigate finite-size effects, and the role of the harmonic confinement.
We model the one-dimension (1D) to three-dimension (3D) crossover in a cylindrically trapped Fermi gas with attractive interactions and spin-imbalance. We calculate the mean-field phase diagram, and study the relative stability of exotic superfluid phases as a function of interaction strength and temperature. For weak interactions and low density, we find 1D-like behavior, which repeats as a function of the chemical potential as new channels open. For strong interactions, mixing of single-particle levels gives 3D-like behavior at all densities. Furthermore, we map the system to an effective 1D model, finding significant density dependence of the effective 1D scattering length.
Motivated by experiments performed by Landig et al. [Nature 532, 476-479], we consider a two dimensional Bose gas in an optical lattice, trapped inside a single mode superradiant Fabry Perot cavity. The cavity mediates infinite range checkerboard interactions between the atoms, which produces competition between Mott insulator, charge density wave, superfluid and supersolid phases. We calculate the phase diagram of this Bose gas in a homogeneous system and in the presence of a harmonic trap.
We propose an experimental protocol to directly observe the Kondo effect by scattering ultracold atoms with spin-dependent interactions. We propose using an optical Feshbach resonance to engineer Kondo-type spin-dependent interactions in a system with ultracold $^6$Li and $^{87}$Rb gases. We calculate the momentum transferred from the $^{87}$Rb gas to the $^6$Li gas in a scattering experiment and show that it has a logarithmically enhanced temperature dependence, characteristic of the Kondo effect and analogous to the resistivity of alloys with magnetic impurities. Experimentally detecting this enhancement will give a different perspective on the Kondo effect, and allow us to explore a rich variety of problems such as the Kondo lattice problem and heavy-fermion systems.