Phases of Attractive Fermi Gases in Synthetic Dimensions

TL;DR

This paper explores the complex phases of attractive fermions in synthetic dimensions created by hyperfine states in cold atoms, revealing novel phases and transitions using analytical and numerical methods.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of many-body phases in synthetic dimension fermionic systems, including the discovery of squished baryon fluids and phase transitions.

Findings

Identification of squished baryon fluid phase

Observation of ferrometallic to superfluid crossover

Study of quantum phase separation in multiflavor fermions

Abstract

A novel way to produce quantum Hall ribbons in a cold atomic system is to use M hyperfine states of atoms in a 1D optical lattice to mimic an additional "synthetic dimension". A notable aspect here is that the SU(M) symmetric interaction between atoms manifests as "infinite ranged" along the synthetic dimension. We study the many body physics of fermions with attractive interactions in this system. We use a combination of analytical field theoretic and numerical density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) methods to reveal the rich ground state phase diagram of the system, including novel phases such as squished baryon fluids. Remarkably, changing the parameters entails unusual crossovers and transitions, e. g., we show that increasing the magnetic field (that produces the Hall effect) may convert a "ferrometallic" state at low fields to a "squished baryon superfluid" (with algebraic pairing correlations) at high fields. We also show that this system provides a unique opportunity to study quantum phase separation in a multiflavor ultracold fermionic system.