Wednesday, January 16, 2013

1301.3470 (Hao Song et al.)

Mott insulators of ultracold fermionic alkaline earth atoms in three
dimensions
   [PDF]

Hao Song, Michael Hermele
We study a class of SU(N) Heisenberg models, describing Mott insulators of fermionic ultra-cold alkaline earth atoms on the three-dimensional simple cubic lattice. Based on an earlier semiclassical analysis, magnetic order is unlikely, and we focus instead on a solvable large-N limit designed to address the competition among non-magnetic ground states. We find a rich phase diagram as a function of the filling parameter k, composed of a variety of ground states spontaneously breaking lattice symmetries, and in some cases also time reversal symmetry. One particularly striking example is a state spontaneously breaking lattice rotation symmetry, where the cubic lattice breaks up into bilayers, each of which forms a two-dimensional chiral spin liquid state.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3470

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