Chiral orbital magnetism of $p$-orbital bosons in optical lattices

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that chiral orbital magnetism can be realized in cold atom systems loaded in the p-band of optical lattices, leveraging inversion symmetry breaking and orbital degeneracy, with potential applications in spintronics.

Contribution

It introduces a new paradigm for chiral orbital magnetism using bosonic atoms in optical lattices, expanding beyond traditional magnetic materials.

Findings

Chiral orbital magnetism appears with inversion symmetry breaking and orbital degeneracy.

DMRG calculations confirm the existence of chiral orbital magnetism in the p-band bosonic system.

System tunability is demonstrated through manipulation of inversion symmetry.

Abstract

Chiral magnetism is a fascinating quantum phenomena that has been found in low-dimensional magnetic materials. It is not only interesting for understanding the concept of chirality, but also important for potential applications in spintronics. Past studies show that chiral magnets require both lack of the inversion symmetry and spin-orbit coupling to induce the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction. Here we report that the combination of inversion symmetry breaking and quantum degeneracy of orbital degrees of freedom will provide a new paradigm to achieve the chiral orbital magnetism. By means of the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) calculation, we demonstrate that the chiral orbital magnetism can be found when considering bosonic atoms loaded in the $p$-band of an optical lattice in the Mott regime. The high tunability of our scheme is also illustrated through simply manipulating the inversion symmetry of the system for the cold atom experimental conditions.