Confinement Induced Quantum Phase Transition and Polarization Cooling in a Dipolar Crystal of Polar Molecules

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how optical confinement influences quantum phase transitions and entropy in low-dimensional dipolar crystals of polar molecules, revealing a polarization cooling mechanism and phase control via aspect ratio adjustments.

Contribution

It uncovers the impact of parabolic optical confinement on quantum phases and entropy in dipolar crystals, highlighting a new polarization cooling process and phase transition control.

Findings

Quantum phase transition between liquid and solid states induced by confinement.

Enhanced entropy in the crystal state suggests a polarization cooling mechanism.

Confinement aspect ratio controls domain wall pattern formation.

Abstract

It is well-known that the liquid properties in a strongly confined system can be very different from their ordinary behaviors in an extended system, due to the competition between the thermal energy and the interaction energy. Here we show that, in a low-dimensional self-assembled dipolar crystal, the parabolic optical confinement potential can also strongly affect the quantum many-body properties in the low temperature regime. For example, by changing the confinement aspect ratio, the bulk of the system can undergo a quantum phase transition between a liquid state and a solid state via a nonmonotonic pattern formation of the domain wall. Furthermore, the entropy of a trapped dipolar crystal can be much larger than the liquid state in the weak dipole limit, indicating an intrinsic polarization cooling mechanism via increasing the external field. These highly correlated confinement effects are very important to the experimental preparation of a self-assembled dipolar crystal using ultracold polar molecules.