Driven-dissipative many-body pairing states for cold fermionic atoms in an optical lattice

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to prepare many-body pairing states of cold fermionic atoms in optical lattices through engineered dissipative processes, enabling controlled state preparation without direct interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel dissipative scheme using jump operators to generate fermionic pairing states with various symmetries, supported by numerical simulations and potential experimental implementation.

Findings

Dissipative gap ensures exponential convergence to steady states.

Complete sets of jump operators successfully produce pairing states.

Method enables adiabatic transfer to Fermi-Hubbard ground states.

Abstract

We discuss the preparation of many-body states of cold fermionic atoms in an optical lattice via controlled dissipative processes induced by coupling the system to a reservoir. Based on a mechanism combining Pauli blocking and phase locking between adjacent sites, we construct complete sets of jump operators describing coupling to a reservoir that leads to dissipative preparation of pairing states for fermions with various symmetries in the absence of direct inter-particle interactions. We discuss the uniqueness of these states, and demonstrate it with small-scale numerical simulations. In the late time dissipative dynamics, we identify a "dissipative gap" that persists in the thermodynamic limit. This gap implies exponential convergence of all many-body observables to their steady state values. We then investigate how these pairing states can be used as a starting point for the preparation of the ground state of Fermi-Hubbard Hamiltonian via an adiabatic state preparation process also involving the parent Hamiltonian of the pairing state. We also provide a proof-of-principle example for implementing these dissipative processes and the parent Hamiltonians of the pairing states, based on Yb171 atoms in optical lattice potentials.