Interaction-induced exotic vortex states in an optical lattice clock with spin-orbit coupling

TL;DR

This paper investigates how interactions induce exotic vortex states in a spin-orbit coupled optical lattice clock, revealing complex phases and current patterns through numerical analysis, with implications for quantum simulation and atomic clock technologies.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of interaction-induced vortex states in a coupled-ladder system with spin-orbit coupling, expanding understanding of many-body effects in optical lattice clocks.

Findings

Exotic vortex states emerge due to inter-orbital interactions.

Rich phase diagram with competing phases identified.

Interactions significantly influence spin-orbit coupled systems.

Abstract

Motivated by a recent experiment [L. F. Livi, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 220401(2016)], we study the ground-state properties of interacting fermions in a one-dimensional optical lattice clock with spin-orbit coupling. As the electronic and the hyperfine-spin states in the clock-state manifolds can be treated as effective sites along distinct synthetic dimensions, the system can be considered as multiple two-leg ladders with uniform magnetic flux penetrating the plaquettes of each ladder. As the inter-orbital spin-exchange interactions in the clock-state manifolds couple individual ladders together, we show that exotic interaction-induced vortex states emerge in the coupled-ladder system, which compete with existing phases of decoupled ladders and lead to a rich phase diagram. Adopting the density matrix renormalization group approach, we map out the phase diagram, and investigate in detail the currents and the density-density correlations of the various phases. Our results reveal the impact of interactions on spin-orbit coupled systems, and are particularly relevant to the on-going exploration of spin-orbit coupled optical lattice clocks.