Preparation and detection of d-wave superfluidity in two-dimensional optical superlattices

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to create and detect d-wave superfluidity in ultracold fermionic atoms within two-dimensional optical superlattices, enabling exploration of pairing mechanisms and phase transitions.

Contribution

It introduces a controlled scheme using superplaquettes to realize and probe d-wave superfluidity and related phases in ultracold atom systems.

Findings

Proposed a scheme to prepare d-wave superfluidity in optical lattices.

Derived the phase diagram showing transitions between superfluid and density wave phases.

Suggested noise correlation measurements for experimental detection.

Abstract

We propose a controlled method to create and detect d-wave superfluidity with ultracold fermionic atoms loaded in two-dimensional optical superlattices. Our scheme consists in preparing an array of nearest-neighbor coupled square plaquettes or ``superplaquettes'' and using them as building blocks to construct a d-wave superfluid state. We describe how to use the coherent dynamical evolution in such a system to experimentally probe the pairing mechanism. We also derive the zero temperature phase diagram of the fermions in a checkerboard lattice (many weakly coupled plaquettes) and show that by tuning the inter-plaquette tunneling spin-dependently or varying the filling factor one can drive the system into a d-wave superfluid phase or a Cooper pair density wave phase. We discuss the use of noise correlation measurements to experimentally probe these phases.