Bose-Fermi mixtures of self-assembled filaments of fermionic polar molecules

TL;DR

This paper explores the complex behavior of self-assembled fermionic polar molecule filaments in 1D optical lattices, revealing diverse quantum phases and potential experimental probes for these Bose-Fermi mixtures.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of filament formation and the resulting Bose-Fermi mixture in a 1D lattice, highlighting novel quantum scenarios and temperature-dependent behaviors.

Findings

Rich variety of quantum phases including degenerate Fermi gas of trimers

Binary mixtures of bosonic dimers and fermionic trimers

Potential experimental methods to probe chain mixtures

Abstract

Fermionic polar molecules in deep 1D optical lattices may form self-assembled filaments when the electric dipoles are oriented along the lattice axis. These composites are bosons or fermions depending on the number of molecules per chain, leading to a peculiar and complex Bose-Fermi mixture, which we discuss in detail for the simplest case of a three-well potential. We show that the interplay between filament binding energy, transverse filament modes, and trimer Fermi energy leads to a rich variety of possible scenarios ranging from a degenerate Fermi gas of trimers to a binary mixture of two different types of bosonic dimers. We study the intriguing zero temperature and finite temperature physics of these composites for the particular case of an ideal filament gas loaded in 1D sites, and discuss possible methods to probe these chain mixtures.