Emerging Bosons with Three-Body Interactions from Spin-1 Atoms in Optical Lattices

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to realize and study exotic bosonic phases with three-body interactions using ultracold spin-1 atoms in optical lattices, enabling exploration of novel quantum states.

Contribution

It introduces a spin-1 lattice Hamiltonian approach to simulate three-body bosonic interactions and suggests experimental setups for observing pair condensates and Pfaffian states.

Findings

Proposes a spin-1 atom setup for three-body bosonic interactions

Designs a scheme to realize pair quasi-condensates experimentally

Outlines a route to create a bosonic Pfaffian wavefunction

Abstract

We study two many-body systems of bosons interacting via an infinite three-body contact repulsion in a lattice: a pairs quasi-condensate induced by correlated hopping and the discrete version of the Pfaffian wavefunction. We propose to experimentally realise systems characterized by such interaction by means of a proper spin-1 lattice Hamiltonian: spin degrees of freedom are locally mapped into occupation numbers of emerging bosons, in a fashion similar to spin-1/2 and hardcore bosons. Such a system can be realized with ultracold spin-1 atoms in a Mott Insulator with filling-factor one. The high versatility of these setups allows us to engineer spin-hopping operators breaking the SU(2) symmetry, as needed to approximate interesting bosonic Hamiltonians with three-body hardcore constraint. For this purpose we combine bichromatic spin-independent superlattices and Raman transitions to induce a different hopping rate for each spin orientation. Finally, we illustrate how our setup could be used to experimentally realize the first setup, i.e. the transition to a pairs quasi-condensed phase of the emerging bosons. We also report on a route towards the realization of a discrete bosonic Pfaffian wavefunction and list some open problems to reach this goal.