arXiv subjects

Hui Zhai

Publications and source records attributed to Hui Zhai.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

Controlled Transport between Fermi Superfluids Through a Quantum Point Contact

Recent advances in experimental techniques allow one to create a quantum point contact between two Fermi superfluids in cold atomic gases with a tunable transmission coefficient. In this Letter we propose that three distinct behaviors of charge transports between two Fermi superfluids can be realized in this single setup, which are the multiple Andreev reflection, the self-trapping and the Josephson oscillation. We investigate the dynamics of atom number difference between two reservoirs for different initial conditions and different transmission coefficients, and present a coherent picture of how the crossover between different regimes takes place. Our results can now be directly verified in current experimental system.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2017

Strongly Interacting Bose Gases near a $d$-wave Shape Resonance

Many unconventional quantum matters, such as fractional quantum Hall effect and $d$-wave high-Tc superconductor, are discovered in strongly interacting systems. Understanding quantum many-body systems with strong interaction and the unconventional phases therein is one of the most challenging problems in physics nowadays. Cold atom systems possess a natural way to create strong interaction by bringing the system to the vicinity of a scattering resonance. Although this has been a focused topic in cold atom physics for more than a decade, these studies have so far mostly been limited for $s$-wave resonance. Here we report the experimental observation of a broad $d$-wave shape resonance in degenerate ${}^{41}$K gas. We further measure the molecular binding energy that splits into three branches as a hallmark of $d$-wave molecules, and find that the lifetime of this many-body system is reasonably long at strongly interacting regime. From analyzing the breathing mode excited by ramping through this resonance, it suggests that a quite stable low-temperature atom and molecule mixture is produced. Putting all the evidence together, our system offers great promise to reach a $d$-wave molecular superfluid.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2017

Efimov Effect in the Dirac Semi-metals

Efimov effect refers to quantum states with discrete scaling symmetry and a universal scaling factor, and has attracted considerable interests from nuclear to atomic physics communities. In a Dirac semi-metal, when an electron interacts with a static impurity though a Coulomb interaction, the same scaling of the kinetic and interaction energies also gives rise to such a Efimov effect. However, even when the Fermi energy exactly lies at the Dirac point, the vacuum polarization of electron-hole pair fluctuation can still screen the Coulomb interaction, which leads to derivation from this scaling symmetry and eventually breakdown of the Efimov effect. This distortion of the Efimov bound state energy due to vacuum polarization is a relativistic electron analogy of the Lamb shift for the hydrogen atom. Motivated by recent experimental observations in two- and three-dimensional Dirac semi-metals, in this paper we investigate this many-body correction to the Efimov effect, and answer the question that under what condition a good number of Efimov-like bound states can still be observed in these condensed matter experiments.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2017

Universal Feature in Optical Control of a p-wave Feshbach Resonance

In this Letter we report the experimental results on optical control of a p-wave Feshbach resonance, by utilizing a laser driven bound-to-bound transition to shift the energy of closed channel molecule. The magnetic field location for p-wave resonance as a function of laser detuning can be captured by a simple formula with essentially one parameter, which describes how sensitive the resonance depends on the laser detuning. The key result of this work is to demonstrate, both experimentally and theoretically, that the ratio between this parameter for $m=0$ resonance and that for $m=\pm 1$ resonance, to large extent, is universal. We also show that this optical control can create intriguing situations where interesting few- and many-body physics can occurs, such as a p-wave resonance overlapping with an s-wave resonance or three p-wave resonances being degenerate.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2017

Symmetry Protected Dynamical Symmetry in the Generalized Hubbard Models

In this letter we present a theorem on the dynamics of the generalized Hubbard models. This theorem shows that the symmetry of the single particle Hamiltonian can protect a kind of dynamical symmetry driven by the interactions. Here the dynamical symmetry refers to that the time evolution of certain observables are symmetric between the repulsive and attractive Hubbard models. We demonstrate our theorem with three different examples in which the symmetry involves bipartite lattice symmetry, reflection symmetry and translation symmetry, respectively. Each of these examples relates to one recent cold atom experiment on the dynamics in the optical lattices where such a dynamical symmetry is manifested. These experiments include expansion dynamics of cold atoms, chirality of atomic motion within a synthetic magnetic field and melting of charge-density-wave order. Therefore, our theorem provides a unified view of these seemingly disparate phenomena.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2017

Out-of-Time-Order Correlation at a Quantum Phase Transition

In this paper we numerically calculate the out-of-time-order correlation functions in the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model. Our study is motivated by the conjecture that a system with Lyapunov exponent saturating the upper bound $2π/β$ will have a holographic dual to a black hole at finite temperature. We further conjecture that for a many-body quantum system with a quantum phase transition, the Lyapunov exponent will have a peak in the quantum critical region where there exists an emergent conformal symmetry and is absent of well-defined quasi-particles. With the help of a relation between the Rényi entropy and the out-of-time-order correlation function, we argue that the out-of-time-order correlation function of the Bose-Hubbard model will also exhibit an exponential behavior at the scrambling time. By fitting the numerical results with an exponential function, we extract the Lyapunov exponents in the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model across the quantum critical regime at finite temperature. Our results on the Bose-Hubbard model support the conjecture. We also compute the butterfly velocity and propose how the echo type measurement of this correlator in the cold atom realizations of the Bose-Hubbard model without inverting the Hamiltonian.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2017

Unsupervised Learning of Frustrated Classical Spin Models I: Principle Component Analysis

This work aims at the goal whether the artificial intelligence can recognize phase transition without the prior human knowledge. If this becomes successful, it can be applied to, for instance, analyze data from quantum simulation of unsolved physical models. Toward this goal, we first need to apply the machine learning algorithm to well-understood models and see whether the outputs are consistent with our prior knowledge, which serves as the benchmark of this approach. In this work, we feed the compute with data generated by the classical Monte Carlo simulation for the XY model in frustrated triangular and union jack lattices, which has two order parameters and exhibits two phase transitions. We show that the outputs of the principle component analysis agree very well with our understanding of different orders in different phases, and the temperature dependences of the major components detect the nature and the locations of the phase transitions. Our work offers promise for using machine learning techniques to study sophisticated statistical models, and our results can be further improved by using principle component analysis with kernel tricks and the neural network method.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2017

Measuring out-of-time-order correlators on a nuclear magnetic resonance quantum simulator

The idea of the out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC) has recently emerged in the study of both condensed matter systems and gravitational systems. It not only plays a key role in investigating the holographic duality between a strongly interacting quantum system and a gravitational system, but also diagnoses the chaotic behavior of many-body quantum systems and characterizes the information scrambling. Based on the OTOCs, three different concepts -- quantum chaos, holographic duality, and information scrambling -- are found to be intimately related to each other. Despite of its theoretical importance, the experimental measurement of the OTOC is quite challenging and so far there is no experimental measurement of the OTOC for local operators. Here we report the measurement of OTOCs of local operators for an Ising spin chain on a nuclear magnetic resonance quantum simulator. We observe that the OTOC behaves differently in the integrable and non-integrable cases. Based on the recent discovered relationship between OTOCs and the growth of entanglement entropy in the many-body system, we extract the entanglement entropy from the measured OTOCs, which clearly shows that the information entropy oscillates in time for integrable models and scrambles for non-intgrable models. With the measured OTOCs, we also obtain the experimental result of the butterfly velocity, which measures the speed of correlation propagation. Our experiment paves a way for experimentally studying quantum chaos, holographic duality, and information scrambling in many-body quantum systems with quantum simulators.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2017

Emergent Symmetry at Superradiance Transition of a Bose Condensate in Two Crossed Beam Cavities

Recently the ETH group has reported an experiment on superradiant transition of a Bose condensate in two crossed beam cavities. The surprise is that they find that across the superradiant transition, the cavity light can be emitted in any superposition of these two cavity modes. This indicates an additional $U(1)$ symmetry that does not exist in the full Hamiltonian. In this letter we show that this symmetry is an emergent symmetry in the vicinity of the phase transition. We identify all the necessary conditions that are required for this emergent $U(1)$ symmetry and show that the ETH experiment is a special case that satisfies these conditions. We further show that the superradiant transition in this system can also be driven to a first order one when the system is tuned away from the point having the emergent symmetry.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2017

Visualizing Efimov Correlations in the Bose Polaron

The Bose polaron is a quasi-particle of an impurity dressed by surrounding bosons. In few-body physics, it is known that two identical bosons and a third distinguishable particle can form a sequence of Efimov bound states in the vicinity of inter-species scattering resonance. On the other hand, in the Bose polaron system with an impurity atom embedded in many bosons, no signature of Efimov physics has been reported in the existing spectroscopy measurements up to date. In this work, we propose that a large mass imbalance between a light impurity and heavy bosons can help produce visible signatures of Efimov physics in such a spectroscopy measurement. Using the diagrammatic approach in the Virial expansion to include three-body effects from pair-wise interactions, we determine the impurity self-energy and its spectral function. Taking $^{6}$Li-$^{133}$Cs\ system as a concrete example, we find two visible Efimov branches in the polaron spectrum, as well as their hybridizations with the attractive polaron branch. We also discuss the general scenarios for observing the signature of Efimov physics in polaron systems. This work paves the way for experimentally exploring intriguing few-body correlations in a many-body system in the near future.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2017

Tunable Quantum Chaos in the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev Model Coupled to a Thermal Bath

The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model describes Majorana fermions with random interaction, which displays many interesting properties such as non-Fermi liquid behavior, quantum chaos, emergent conformal symmetry and holographic duality. Here we consider a SYK model or a chain of SYK models with $N$ Majorana fermion modes coupled to another SYK model with $N^2$ Majorana fermion modes, in which the latter has many more degrees of freedom and plays the role as a thermal bath. For a single SYK model coupled to the thermal bath, we show that although the Lyapunov exponent is still proportional to temperature, it monotonically decreases from $2π/β$ ($β=1/(k_BT)$, $T$ is temperature) to zero as the coupling strength to the thermal bath increases. For a chain of SYK models, when they are uniformly coupled to the thermal bath, we show that the butterfly velocity displays a crossover from a $\sqrt{T}$-dependence at relatively high temperature to a linear $T$-dependence at low temperature, with the crossover temperature also controlled by the coupling strength to the thermal bath. If only the end of the SYK chain is coupled to the thermal bath, the model can introduce a spatial dependence of both the Lyapunov exponent and the butterfly velocity. Our models provide canonical examples for the study of thermalization within chaotic models.

hep-th↗

arXiv2017

Enhancing Kondo Coupling in Alkaline-Earth Atomic Gases with Confinement-induced Resonances in Mixed Dimensions

The Kondo effect describes the spin-exchanging interaction between localized impurity and the itinerant fermions. The ultracold alkaline-earth atomic gas provides a natural platform for quantum simulation of the Kondo model, utilizing its long-lived clock state and the nuclear-spin exchanging interaction between the clock state and the ground state. One of the key issue now is whether the Kondo temperature can be high enough to be reached in current experiment, for which we have proposed using a transverse confinement to confine atoms into a one-dimensional tube and to utilize the confinement-induced resonance to enhance the Kondo coupling. In this work, we further consider the $1+0$ dimensional scattering problem when the clock state is further confined by an axial harmonic confinement. We show that this axial confinement for the clock state atoms not only plays a role for localizing them, but also can act as an additional control knob to reach the confinement-induced resonance. We show that by combining both the transverse and the axial confinements, the confinement-induced resonance can be reached in the practical conditions and the Kondo effect can be attainable in this system.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2017

Out-of-Time-Order Correlation for Many-Body Localization

In this paper we first compute the out-of-time-order correlators (OTOC) for both a phenomenological model and a random-field XXZ model in the many-body localized phase. We show that the OTOC decreases in power law in a many-body localized system at the scrambling time. We also find that the OTOC can also be used to distinguish a many-body localized phase from an Anderson localized phase, while a normal correlator cannot. Furthermore, we prove an exact theorem that relates the growth of the second Rényi entropy in the quench dynamics to the decay of the OTOC in equilibrium. This theorem works for a generic quantum system. We discuss various implications of this theorem.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2017

Competition between Chaotic and Non-Chaotic Phases in a Quadratically Coupled Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev Model

The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model is a concrete solvable model to study non-Fermi liquid properties, holographic duality and maximally chaotic behavior. In this work, we consider a generalization of the SYK model that contains two SYK models with different number of Majorana modes coupled by quadratic terms. This model is also solvable, and the solution shows a zero-temperature quantum phase transition between two non-Fermi liquid chaotic phases. This phase transition is driven by tuning the ratio of two mode numbers, and a Fermi liquid non-chaotic phase sits at the critical point with equal mode number. At finite temperature, the Fermi liquid phase expands to a finite regime. More intriguingly, a different non-Fermi liquid phase emerges at finite temperature. We characterize the phase diagram in term of the spectral function, the Lyapunov exponent and the entropy. Our results illustrate a concrete example of quantum phase transition and critical regime between two non-Fermi liquid phases.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2017

Anomalous Conductance of a strongly interacting Fermi Gas through a Quantum Point Contact

In this work we study the particle conductance of a strongly interacting Fermi gas through a quantum point contact. With an atom-molecule two-channel model, we compute the contribution to particle conductance by both the fermionic atoms and the bosonic molecules using the Keldysh formalism. Focusing on the regime above the Fermi superfluid transition temperature, we find that the fermionic contribution to the conductance is reduced by interaction compared with the quantized value for the non-interacting case; while the bosonic contribution to the conductance exhibits a plateau with non-universal values that is larger than the quantized conductance. This feature is particularly profound at temperature close to the superfluid transition. We emphasize that the enhanced conductance arises because of the bosonic nature of closed channel molecules and the low-dimensionality of the quantum point contact.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2016

Measuring Topological Number of a Chern-Insulator from Quench Dynamics

In this letter we show how the topological number of a static Hamiltonian can be measured from a dynamical quench process. We focus on a two-band Chern insulator in two-dimension, for instance, the Haldane model, whose dynamical process can be described by a mapping from the $[k_x,k_y,t]$ space to the Bloch sphere, characterized by the Hopf invariant. Such a mapping has been constructed experimentally by measurements in cold atom systems. We show that, taking any two constant vectors on the Bloch sphere, their inverse images of this mapping are two trajectories in the $[k_x,k_y,t]$ space, and the linking number of these two trajectories exactly equals to the Chern number of the static Hamiltonian. Applying this result to a recent experiment from the Hamburg group, we show that the linking number of the trajectories of the phase vortices determines the phase boundary of the static Hamiltonian.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2016

Dynamic Super Efimov Effect

Super Efimov effect is a recently proposed three-body effect characterized by a double-exponential scaling, which has not been observed experimentally yet. Here, we present the general dynamic equations determining the cloud size of a scale invariant quantum gas in a time dependent harmonic trap. We show that a double-log periodicity as the hallmark of the super Efimov effect emerges when the trap frequency is decreased with a specially designed time-dependence. We also demonstrate that this dynamic super Efimov effect can be realized with realistic choices of parameters in current experiments.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2016

Vortex Lattices in the Bose-Fermi Superfluid Mixture

In this letter we show that the vortex lattice structure in the Bose-Fermi superfluid mixture can undergo a sequence of structure transitions when the Fermi superfluid is tuned from the BCS regime to the BEC regime. This is due to different vortex core structure of the Fermi superfluid in the BCS regime and in the BEC regime. In the former the vortex core is nearly filled, while the density at the vortex core gradually decreases until it empties out at the BEC regime. Therefore, with the density-density interaction between the Bose and the Fermi superfluids, the two sets of vortex lattices interact stronger in the BEC regime that yields the structure transition of vortex lattices. In view of recent realization of this superfluid mixture and vortices therein, our theoretical predication can be verified experimentally in near future.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗