arXiv subjects

Xiaoling Cui

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaoling Cui.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Interaction induced dynamical $\mathcal{PT}$ symmetry breaking in dissipative Fermi-Hubbard models

We investigate the dynamical properties of one-dimensional dissipative Fermi-Hubbard models, which are described by the Lindblad master equations with site-dependent jump operators. The corresponding non-Hermitian effective Hamiltonians with pure loss terms possess parity-time ($\mathcal{PT}$) symmetry if we compensate the system additionally an overall gain term. By solving the two-site Lindblad equation with fixed dissipation exactly, we find that the dynamics of rescaled density matrix shows an instability as the interaction increases over a threshold, which can be equivalently described in the scheme of non-Hermitian effective Hamiltonians. This instability is also observed in multi-site systems and closely related to the $\mathcal{PT}$ symmetry breaking accompanied by appearance of complex eigenvalues of the effective Hamiltonian. Moreover, we unveil that the dynamical instability of the anti-ferromagnetic Mott phase comes from the $\mathcal{PT}$ symmetry breaking in highly excited bands, although the low-energy effective model of the non-Hermitian Hubbard model in the strongly interacting regime is always Hermitian. We also provide a quantitative estimation of the time for the observation of dynamical $\mathcal{PT}$ symmetry breaking which could be probed in experiments.

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arXiv2020

Highly polarized one-dimensional Fermi gases near a narrow $p-$wave resonance

Based on the recently developed interaction renormalization for the one-dimensional $p$-wave interaction, we study the problem of a single impurity immersed in a highly polarized Fermi sea. They interact through a narrow $p$-wave Feshbach resonance, so the effective range $r_{0}$ naturally appears in the system. We use the variational approach limited to single-particle-hole excitations on top of the unperturbed Fermi sea. The polaron exhibits two branches of solutions, namely, the attractive and repulsive branches, with varying scattering length across the resonance. We calculate the energy spectrum, residue and effective mass for each of the branches. We compare the polaronic energy with the energy of the dressed molecule, and find that the molecular state is energetically favored when increasing the interaction strength. The critical interaction strength for the polaron-to-molecule transition will shift to the BCS side of the $p$-wave resonance as the effective range increases.

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arXiv2020

Quantum droplet in a mixture of Bose-Fermi superfluids

We study the formation of quantum droplets in the mixture of a single-component Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), and a two-species Fermi superfluid across a wide Feshbach resonance. With repulsive boson-boson and attractive boson-fermion interactions, we show that quantum droplets can be stabilized by attractive fermion-fermion interactions in the Bardeen-Cooper-Schieffer (BCS) side of the resonance, and can also exist in deep BEC regime under weak boson-fermion interactions. We map out the phase diagram for stable droplets with respect to the boson-boson and boson-fermion interactions, and discuss the role of different types of quantum fluctuations in the relevant regions of the BCS-BEC crossover. Our work reveals the impact of fermion pairing on the formation of quantum droplets in Bose-Fermi mixtures, and provides a useful guide for future experiments.

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arXiv2019

Anharmonicity Induced Supersolidity In Spin-Orbit Coupled Bose-Einstein Condensates

Supersolid, a fascinating quantum state of matter, features novel phenomena such as the non-classical rotational inertia and transport anomalies. It is a long standing issue of the coexistence of superfluidity and broken translational symmetry in condensed matter physics. By recent experimental advances to create tunable synthetic spin-orbit coupling in ultracold gases, such highly controllable atomic systems would provide new possibilities to access supersolidity with no counterpart in solids. Here we report that the combination of anharmonicity of trapping potential and spin-orbit coupling will provide a new paradigm to achieve supersolids. By means of imaginary time evolution of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, we demonstrate that a supersolid state can be found when considering a trapped Rashba-type spin-orbit coupled bosonic atoms loaded in a one-dimensional optical lattice. Furthermore, a skyrmion-anti-skyrmion lattice is associated with the appearance of such supersoildity, indicating the topological nontrivial properties of our proposed supersolids.

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arXiv2019

Three in Many: Efimov physics in the presence of a Fermi sea

Motivated by recent experiments on $^{6}$Li-$^{133}$Cs atomic mixtures with high mass imbalance, we study the Efimov correlation in atomic system of two heavy bosons ($^{133}$Cs) immersed in a bath of light fermions ($^{6}$Li). Using the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, we identify two different regimes, depending on the Fermi momentum of light fermions ($k_F$) and the boson-fermion scattering length $a_s(<0)$, where the presence of underlying Fermi sea plays distinct roles in the Efimov-type binding of bosons. Namely, in the regime $k_F|a_s|\lesssim 1$ ($k_F|a_s|\gtrsim1$), the Fermi sea induces an attractive (repulsive) effective interaction between bosons and thus favors (disfavors) the formation of bound state, which can be seen as the Efimov trimer dressed by the fermion cloud. Interestingly, this implies a non-monotonic behavior of these bound states as increasing the fermion density (or $k_F$). Moreover, we establish a generalized universal scaling law for the emergence/variation of such dressed Efimov bound states when incorporating a new scale ($k_F$) brought by the Fermi sea. These results can be directly tested in Li-Cs cold atoms experiment by measuring the modified bound state spectrum and the shifted Efimov resonance, which manifest an emergent non-trivial Efimov correlation in a fermionic many-body environment.

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arXiv2019

Interacting non-Hermitian ultracold atoms in a harmonic trap: Two-body exact solution and high-order exceptional point

We study interacting ultracold atoms in a three-dimensional (3D) harmonic trap with spin-selective dissipations, which can be effectively described by non-Hermitian parity-time ($\mathcal{PT}$) symmetric Hamiltonians. By solving the non-Hermitian two-body problem of spin-1/2 (spin-1) bosons in a 3D harmonic trap exactly, we find that the system can exhibit third-order (fifth-order) exceptional point (EP) with ultra-sensitive cube-root (fifth-root) spectral response due to interaction anisotropies in spin channels. We also present the general principle for the creation of high-order EPs and their spectral sensitivities with arbitrary particle number $N$ and arbitrary spin $s$. Generally, with spin-independent interactions, the EP order of bosons can be as high as $2Ns+1$, and the spectral response around EP can be as sensitive as $\sim ε^{1/(2ks+1)}$ under a $k$-body interaction anisotropy. Moreover, we propose to detect the ultra-sensitive spectral response through the probability dynamics of certain state. These results suggest a convenient route towards more powerful sensor devices in spinor cold atomic systems.

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arXiv2019

Experimental generation of phase wraps for subwavelength phase structures in Bose-Einstein condensate with two-dimensional optical lattice

We report an experimental demonstration of engineering phase wraps for sub-wavelength structure in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with two-dimensional optical lattices. A short lattice pulse is applied on BEC working in the Kapitza-Dirac (or Raman-Nath) regime, which corresponds to phase modulation imprint on matter wave. When the phase modulation on matter wave is larger than $2π$ in a lattice cell, there appears phase wraps with multiple $2π$ jumps, generating the sub-wavelength phase structure. The phase wraps for sub-wavelength structure are measured in momentum space via the time-of-flight absorption image, which corresponds to converting phase information into amplitude. %Two different kinds of two-dimensional optical lattice are studied, which show the different subwavelength phase structure. Moreover, we identify an additional condition for the validity of Kapitza-Dirac regime, which relies crucially on the lattice configurations. This scheme can be used for studying the property of optical lattices and topological defects in matter wave.

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arXiv2019

Polaron in a $p+ip$ Fermi topological superfluid

We study polaron excitations induced by an impurity interacting with a two-dimensional $p+ip$ Fermi superfluid. As the Fermi-Fermi pairing interaction is tuned, the background Fermi superfluid undergoes a topological phase transition. We show that such a transition is accompanied by a discontinuity in the second derivative of the polaron energy, regardless of the impurity-fermion interaction. We also identify a polaron to trimer crossover when the Fermi superfluid is in the strongly interacting, thus topologically trivial, regime. However, the trimer state is metastable against the molecular state where the impurity binds a Bogoliubov quasiparticle from the Fermi superfluid. By comparing the polaron to molecule transition in our system with that of an impurity in a noninteracting Fermi sea, we find that pairing interactions in the background Fermi superfluid effectively facilitate the impurity-fermion binding. Our results suggest the possibility of using the impurity as a probe for detecting topological phase transitions in the background; they also reveal interesting competitions between various many-body states in the system.

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arXiv2019

Enhanced fermion pairing and superfluidity by an imaginary magnetic field

We show that an imaginary magnetic field(IMF), which can be generated in non-Hermitian systems with spin-dependent dissipations, can greatly enhance the s-wave pairing and superfluidity of spin-1/2 fermions, in distinct contrast to the effect of a real magnetic field. The enhancement can be attributed to the increased coupling constant in low-energy space and the reduced spin gap in forming singlet pairs. We have demonstrated this effect in a number of different fermion systems with and without spin-orbit coupling, using both the two-body exact solution and many-body mean-field theory. Our results suggest an alternative route towards strong fermion superfluid with high superfluid transition temperature.

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arXiv2019

High order exceptional points in ultracold Bose gases

We show that arbitrarily high-order exceptional points (EPs) can be achieved in a repulsively interacting two-species Bose gas in one dimension. By exactly solving the non-Hermitian two-boson problem, we demonstrate the existence of third-order EPs when the system is driven across the parity-time symmetry breaking transition. We further address the fourth-order EPs with three bosons and generalize the results to $N$-body system, where the EP order can be as high as $N+1$. Physically, such high order originates from the intrinsic ferromagnetic correlation in spinor bosons, which renders the entire system collectively behave as a single huge spin. Moreover, we show how to create ultra-sensitive spectral response around EPs via an interaction anisotropy in different spin channels. Our work puts forward the possibility of atomic sensors made from highly controllable ultracold gases.

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arXiv2018

Majorana edge state in a number-conserving Fermi gas with tunable p-wave interaction

The remarkable properties and potential applications of Majorana fermions have led to considerable efforts in recent years to realize topological matters that host these excitations. For a number-conserving system, there have been a few proposals, using either coupled-chain models or multi-component system with spin-orbit coupling, to create number fluctuation of fermion pairs in achieving Majorana fermion. In this work, we show that Majorana edge states can occur in a spinless Fermi gas in 1D lattices with tunable $p$-wave interaction. This is facilitated by the conversion between a pair of (open-channel) fermions and a (close-channel) boson, thereby allowing the number fluctuation of fermion pairs in a single chain. This scheme requires neither spin-orbit coupling nor multi-chain setup and can be implemented easily. Using the density-matrix-renormalization-group method, we have identified the Majorana phase in a wide range of parameter regime as well as its associated phase transitions. The topological nature of the Majorana phase manifests itself in a strong edge-edge correlation in an open chain that is robust against disorder, as well as in a non-trivial winding number in the bulk generated by using twisted boundary condition. It is also shown that the Majorana phase in this system can be stable against atom losses due to few-body collisions on the same site, and can be easily identified from the fermion momentum distribution. These results pave the way for probing the intriguing Majorana physics in a simple and stable cold atoms system.

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arXiv2018

Local manipulation of quantum magnetism in 1D ultracold Fermi gases across narrow resonances

Effective range is a quantity to characterize the energy dependence in two-body scattering strength, and is widely used in cold atomic systems especially across narrow resonances. Here we show that the effective range can significantly modify the magnetic property of one-dimensional (1D) spin-$1/2$ fermions in the strongly repulsive regime. In particular, the effective range breaks the large spin degeneracy in the hard-core limit, and induces a Heisenberg exchange term in the spin chain that is much more sensitive to the local density than that induced by the bare coupling. With an external harmonic trap, this leads to a very rich magnetic pattern where the anti-ferromagnetic (AFM) and ferromagnetic (FM) correlations can coexist and distribute in highly tunable regions across the trap. Finally, we propose to detect the range-induced magnetic order in the tunneling experiment. Our results can be directly tested in 1D Fermi gases across narrow resonance, and suggest a convenient route towards the local manipulation of quantum magnetism in cold atoms.

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arXiv2018

Many-body stabilization of a resonant p-wave Fermi gas in one dimension

Using the asymptotic Bethe Ansatz, we study the stabilization problem of the one-dimensional spin-polarized Fermi gas confined in a hard-wall potential with tunable p-wave scattering length and finite effective range. We find that the interplay of two factors, i.e., the finite interaction range and the hard-wall potential, will stabilize the system near resonance. The stabilization occurs even in the positive scattering length side, where the system undergoes a many-body collapse if any of the factors is absent. At p-wave resonance, the fermion system is found to feature the "quasi-particle condensation" for any value of effective range, which is stabilized if the range is above twice the mean particle distance. Slightly away from resonance, the correction to the stability condition linearly depends on the inverse scattering length. Finally, a global picture is presented for the energetics and stability properties of fermions from weakly attractive to deep bound state regime. Our results raise the possibility for achieving stable p-wave superfluidity in quasi-1D atomic systems, and meanwhile, shed light on the intriguing s- and p-wave physics in 1D that violate the Bose-Fermi duality.

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arXiv2018

Spin-orbit coupling induced quantum droplet in ultracold Bose-Fermi mixtures

Quantum droplets have intrigued much attention recently in view of their successful observations in the ultracold homonuclear atoms. In this work, we demonstrate a new mechanism for the formation of quantum droplet in heteronuclear atomic systems, i.e., by applying the synthetic spin-orbit coupling(SOC). Take the Bose-Fermi mixture for example, we show that by imposing a Rashba SOC between the spin states of fermions, the greatly suppressed Fermi pressure can enable the formation of Bose-Fermi droplets even for very weak boson-fermion attractions, which are insufficient to bound a droplet if without SOC. In such SOC-induced quantum droplets, the boson/fermion density ratio universally depends on the SOC strength, and they occur in the mean-field collapsing regime but with a negative fluctuation energy, distinct from the interaction-induced droplets found in literature. The accessibility of these Bose-Fermi droplets in ultracold Cs-Li and Rb-K mixtures is also discussed. Our results shed light on the droplet formation in a vast class of heteronuclear atomic systems through the manipulation of single-particle physics.

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arXiv2018

Universal relations and normal phase of an ultracold Fermi gas with coexisting $s$- and $p$-wave interactions

We study the universal relations and normal-phase thermodynamics of a two-component ultracold Fermi gas with coexisting $s$- and $p$-wave interactions. Due to the orthogonality of two-body wave functions of different scattering channels, the universal thermodynamic relations of the system appear to be direct summations of contributions from each partial-wave scattering channels. These universal relations are dictated by a set of contacts, which can be associated with either $s$- or $p$-wave interactions. Interestingly, due to the interplay of $s$- and $p$-wave interactions on the many-body level, the contacts, and hence all the relevant thermodynamic quantities, behave differently from those with only $s$- or $p$-wave interactions. These are manifest in our numerical calculations based on second-order virial expansions for $^{40}$K atoms under typical experimental parameters. A particularly interesting finding is that, due to the coexistence of $s$- and $p$-wave scatterings, the interaction energy of the repulsive branch features abrupt changes across the $p$-wave resonances. Our results can be readily checked experimentally for $^{40}$K atoms near the $198$G $p$-wave Feshbach resonance, where multiple partial-wave scatterings naturally coexist.

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arXiv2017

Repulsive Fermi polarons with negative effective mass

Recent LENS experiment on a 3D Fermi gas has reported a negative effective mass ($m^*<0$) of Fermi polarons in the strongly repulsive regime. There naturally arise a question whether the negative $m^*$ is a precursor of the instability towards phase separation (or itinerant ferromagnetism). In this work, we make use of the exact solutions to study the ground state and excitation properties of repulsive Fermi polarons in 1D, which can also exhibit a negative $m^*$ in the super Tonks-Girardeau regime. By analyzing the total spin, quasi-momentum distribution and pair correlations, we conclude that the negative $m^*$ is irrelevant to the instability towards ferromagnetism or phase separation, but rather an intrinsic feature of collective excitations for fermions in the strongly repulsive regime. Surprisingly, for large and negative $m^*$, such excitation is accompanied with a spin density modulation when the majority fermions move closer to the impurity rather than being repelled far away, contrary to the picture of phase separation. These results suggest an alternative interpretation of negative $m^*$ as observed in recent LENS experiment.

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arXiv2017

Stretching p-wave molecules by transverse confinements

We revisit the confinement-induced p-wave resonance in quasi-one-dimensional (quasi-1D) atomic gases and study the induced molecules near resonance. We derive the reduced 1D interaction parameters and show that they can well predict the binding energy of shallow molecules in quasi-1D system. Importantly, these shallow molecules are found to be much more spatially extended compared to those in three dimensions (3D) without transverse confinement. Our results strongly indicate that a p-wave interacting atomic gas can be much more stable in quasi-1D near the induced p-wave resonance, where most weight of the molecule lies outside the short-range regime and thus the atom loss could be suppressed.

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arXiv2017

Enhancing the Efimov correlation in Bose polarons with large mass imbalance

We study the effect of Efimov physics (in the few-body sector) to the spectral response of Bose polaron, a many-body system consisting of an impurity immersed in a bath of bosonic atoms. We find that the Efimov correlation can be greatly enhanced by increasing the mass ratio between the bosons and the impurity, which results in visible signatures in the rf spectrum of the polaron. Using a diagrammatic approach up to the third-order virial expansion, we show how the mass imbalance and the enhanced three-body effect modify the line shape and the width of the polaron spectrum. Moreover, we study the effect of a finite boson-boson interaction to the spectrum. Taking the realistic system of Li impurities immersed in Cs bosons with a positive Cs-Cs scattering length, we find a visible Efimov branch, which is associated with the second lowest Efimov trimer, in the polaron spectrum. In particular, by adjusting the boson density the Efimov branch can greatly hybridize with the attractive polaron branch leading to the spectrum broadening near their avoided level crossing. Our results can be directly probed in the cold atoms experiments of Li-Cs and Li-Rb Bose polarons.

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