Engineering Ising-XY spin-models in a triangular lattice using tunable artificial gauge fields

By J. Struck, Malte Weinberg, C. Olschlager, Patrick Windpassinger, J. Simonet, Klaus Sengstock, R. Hoppner, Philipp Hauke, A. Eckardt, Maciej Lewenstein and 1 more. Nature Physics, 2013

284 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Magnetism plays a key role in modern science and technology, but still many open questions arise from the interplay of magnetic many-body interactions. Deeper insight into complex magnetic behaviour and the nature of magnetic phase transitions can be obtained from, for example, model systems of coupled XY and Ising spins. Here, we report on the experimental realization of such a coupled system with ultracold atoms in triangular optical lattices. This is accomplished by imposing an artificial gauge field on the neutral atoms, which acts on them as a magnetic field does on charged particles. As a result, the atoms show persistent circular currents, the direction of which provides an Ising variable. On this, the tunable staggered gauge field, generated by a periodic driving of the lattice, acts as a longitudinal field. Further, the superfluid ground state presents strong analogies with the paradigm example of the fully frustrated XY model on a triangular lattice. A quantum gas trapped in an optical lattice of triangular symmetry can now be driven from a paramagnetic to an antiferromagnetic state by a tunable artificial magnetic field.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2c67fd94db749b833b0b3c8b0dcaa54063edc785

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Condensed Matter Physics

Citations in the corpus

Artificial gauge fields in materials and engineered systems (2017, unknown): “Before doing so, let us emphasize that cold-atom experiments based on shaken triangular optical lattices were pioneered in Hamburg [255,256], where the generation of local fluxes was exploited to study frustrated magnetism [257].”
Periodically Driven Quantum Systems: Effective Hamiltonians and Engineered Gauge Fields (2014, methodology): “, a lattice system penetrated by a uniform magnetic field [30]), using “shaken” optical lattices [31–34], and to frustrated magnetism, using triangular optical lattices [35,36].”
Experimental realization of the topological Haldane model with ultracold fermions (2014, methodology): “Using a Wannier function calculation(27), we extract the corresponding tight-binding parameters t0,1,2,3/h 5 [2746(81), 2527(17), 2527(17), 2126(7)] Hz, for the horizontal, the left and right vertical nearest-neighbour tunnelling links, and the horizontal link across the honeycomb cell, respectively”
Topological bands for ultracold atoms (2018, methodology): “Unfortunately Struck et al. (2013) demonstrated that this is not the case.”