arXiv subjects

Zhihao Lan

Publications and source records attributed to Zhihao Lan.

46 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2015

Emergent devil's staircase without particle-hole symmetry in Rydberg quantum gases with competing attractive and repulsive interactions

The devil's staircase is a fractal structure that characterizes the ground state of one-dimensional classical lattice gases with long-range repulsive convex interactions. Its plateaus mark regions of stability for specific filling fractions which are controlled by a chemical potential. Typically such staircase has an explicit particle-hole symmetry, i.e., the staircase at more than half-filling can be trivially extracted from the one at less than half filling by exchanging the roles of holes and particles. Here we introduce a quantum spin chain with competing short-range attractive and long-range repulsive interactions, i.e. a non-convex potential. In the classical limit the ground state features generalized Wigner crystals that --- depending on the filling fraction --- are either composed of dimer particles or dimer holes which results in an emergent complete devil's staircase without explicit particle-hole symmetry of the underlying microscopic model. In our system the particle-hole symmetry is lifted due to the fact that the staircase is controlled through a two-body interaction rather than a one-body chemical potential. The introduction of quantum fluctuations through a transverse field melts the staircase and ultimately makes the system enter a paramagnetic phase. For intermediate transverse field strengths, however, we identify a region, where the density-density correlations suggest the emergence of quasi long-range order. We discuss how this physics can be explored with Rydberg-dressed atoms held in a lattice.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2015

Excitonic states of an impurity in a Fermi gas

We study excitonic states of an atomic impurity in a Fermi gas, i.e., bound states consisting of the impurity and a hole. Previous studies considered bound states of the impurity with particles from the Fermi sea where the holes only formed part of the particle-hole dressing. Within a two-channel model, we find that, for a wide range of parameters, excitonic states are not ground but metastable states. We further calculate the decay rates of the excitonic states to polaronic and dimeronic states and find they are long lived, scaling as $Γ^{\rm{Exc}}_ {\rm{Pol}} \propto ( Δω)^{5.5}$ and $Γ^{\rm{Exc}}_ {\rm{Dim}} \propto (Δω)^{4}$. We also find that a new continuum of exciton-particle states should be considered alongside the previously known dimeron-hole continuum in spectroscopic measurements. Excitons must therefore be considered as a new ingredient in the study of metastable physics currently being explored experimentally.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2015

Goos-Hänchen shifts in spin-orbit-coupled cold atoms

We consider a matter wave packet of cold atom gas impinging upon a step potential created by the optical light field. In the presence of spin-orbit (SO) coupling, the atomic eigenstates contain two types of evanescent states, one of which is the ordinary evanescent state with pure imaginary wave vector while the other possesses complex wave vector and is recognized as oscillating evanescent state. We show that the presence and interplay of these two types of evanescent states can give rise to two different mechanisms for total internal reflection (TIR), and thus lead to unusual Goos-Hänchen (GH) effect. As a result, not only large positive but also large negative GH shift can be observed in the reflected atomic beam. The dependence of the GH shift on the incident angle, energy and height of the step potential is studied numerically.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2014

Cavity-induced phase stability to decelerate a fast molecular beam via feedback-controlled time-varying optical pumps

We have identified a novel phase stability mechanism from the intracavity field-induced self-organization of a fast-moving molecular beam into travelling molecular packets in the bad cavity regime, which is then used to decelerate the molecular packets by feedback-controlled time-varying laser pumps to the cavity. We first applied the linear stability analysis to derive an expression for this self-organization in the adiabatic limit and show that the self-organization of the beam leads to the formation of travelling molecular packets, which in turn function as a dynamic Bragg grating, thus modulating periodically the intracavity field by superradiant scattering of the pump photons. The modulation encodes the position information of the molecular packets into the output of the intracavity field instantaneously. We then applied time-varying laser pumps that are automatically switched by the output of the intracavity field to slow down the molecular packets via a feedback mechanism and found that most of the molecules in the molecular packets are decelerated to zero central velocity after tens of stages. Our cavity-based deceleration proposal works well in the bad cavity regime, which is very different from the conventional cavity- based cooling strategies where a good cavity is preferred. Practical issues in realizing the proposal are also discussed.

physics.atom-ph↗

arXiv2014

Deceleration of molecules in a supersonic beam by the optical field in a low-finesse cavity

We study the dynamics of a supersonic molecular beam in a low-finesse optical cavity and demonstrate that most molecules in the beam can be decelerated to zero central velocity by the intracavity optical field in a process analogous to electrostatic Stark deceleration. We show that the rapid switching of the optical field for slowing the molecules is automatically generated by the cavity-induced dynamics. We further show that $\sim1\%$ of the molecules can be optically trapped at a few millikelvin in the same cavity.

physics.atom-ph↗

arXiv2014

Optical lattices with large scattering length: Using few-body physics to simulate an electron-phonon system

We propose to go beyond the usual Hubbard model description of atoms in optical lattices and show how few-body physics can be used to simulate many-body phenomena, e.g., an electron-phonon system. We take one atomic species to be trapped in a deep optical lattice at full filling and another to be untrapped spin-polarized fermions (which do not see the optical lattice) but has an s-wave contact interaction with the first species. For large positive scattering length on the order of lattice spacing, the usual two-body bound (dimer) states overlap forming giant orbitals extending over the entire lattice, which can be viewed as an "electronic" band for the untrapped species while the trapped atoms become the "ions" with their own on-site dynamics, thereby simulating an electron-phonon system with renormalization of the phonon frequencies and Peierls transitions. This setup requires large scattering lengths but minimises losses, does not need higher bands and adds new degrees of freedom which cannot easily be described in terms of lattice variables, thus opening up intriguing possibilities to explore interesting physics at the interface between few-body and many-body systems.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2014

A single impurity in an ideal atomic Fermi gas: current understanding and some open problems

We briefly review some current theoretical and experimental aspects of the problem of a single spinless impurity in a 3D polarised atomic Fermi gas at zero temperature where the interactions can be tuned using a wide Feshbach resonance. We show that various few-body states in vacuum composed of the impurity and background gas atoms (single impurity, dimer, trimer, tetramer) give rise to corresponding dressed states ({\em polaron}, {\em dimeron}, {\em trimeron}, {\em tetrameron}) in the gas and inherit many of their characteristics. We study the ground state focussing on the choice of wave function and its properties. We raise a few unsolved problems: whether the polaron and dimeron are really separate branches, what other few-body states might exist, the nature of the groundstate for large numbers of particle-hole pairs and why is the polaron ansatz so good. We then turn to the excited states, and to the calculation of the effective mass. We examine the bounds on the effective mass and raise a conjecture about that of composite quasiparticle states.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2014

The Raman dressed spin-1 spin-orbit coupled quantum gas

The recently realized spin-orbit coupled quantum gases (Y.-J Lin {\it et al}., Nature 471, 83-86 (2011); P. Wang {\it et al}., PRL 109, 095301 (2012); L. W. Cheuk {\it et al}., PRL 109, 095302 (2012)) mark a breakthrough in the cold atom community. In these experiments, two hyperfine states are selected from a hyperfine manifold to mimic a pseudospin-1/2 spin-orbit coupled system by the method of Raman dressing, which is applicable to both bosonic and fermionic gases. In this work, we show that the method used in these experiments can be generalized to create any large pseudospin spin-orbit coupled gas if more hyperfine states are coupled equally by the Raman lasers. As an example, we study in detail a quantum gas with three hyperfine states coupled by the Raman lasers, and show when the state-dependent energy shifts of the three states are comparable, triple-degenerate minima will appear at the bottom of the band dispersions, thus realizing a spin-1 spin-orbit coupled quantum gas. A novel feature of this three minima regime is that there can be two different kinds of stripe phases with different wavelengths, which has an interesting connection to the ferromagnetic and polar phases of spin-1 spinor BECs without spin-orbit coupling.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2013

Quasiparticle lifetime in ultracold fermionic mixtures with density and mass imbalance

We show that atomic Fermi mixtures with density and mass imbalance exhibit a rich diversity of scaling laws for the quasiparticle decay rate beyond the quadratic energy and temperature dependence of conventional Fermi liquids. For certain densities and mass ratios, the decay rate is linear whereas in other cases it exhibits a plateau. Remarkably, this plateau extends from the deeply degenerate to the high temperature classical regime of the light species. Many of these scaling laws are analogous to what is found in very different systems including dirty metals, liquid metals, and high temperature plasmas. The Fermi mixtures can in this sense span a whole range of seemingly diverse and separate physical systems. Our results are derived in the weakly interacting limit making them quantitatively reliable. The different regimes can be detected with radio-frequency spectroscopy.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2012

Coexistence of spin-1/2 and spin-1 Dirac-Weyl fermions in the edge-centered honeycomb lattice

We investigate the properties of an edge-centered honeycomb lattice, and show that this lattice features both spin-1/2 and spin-1 Dirac-Weyl fermions at different filling fractions f (f=1/5,4/5 for spin-1/2 and f=1/2 for spin-1). This five-band system is the simplest lattice that can support simultaneously the two different paradigmatic Dirac-Weyl fermions with half-integer spin and integer spin. We demonstrate that these pseudo-relativistic structures, including a flat band at half-filling, can be deduced from the underlying Kagome sublattice. We further show that the signatures of the two kinds of relativistic fermions can be clearly revealed by several perturbations, such as a uniform magnetic field, a Haldane-type spin-orbit term, and charge density waves. We comment on the possibility to probe the similarities and differences between the two kinds of relativistic fermions, or even to isolate them individually. We present a realistic scheme to realize such a system using cold atoms.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗