Many-body phases from effective geometrical frustration and long-range interactions in a subwavelength lattice

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to realize and study many-body quantum phases using a subwavelength lattice with engineered geometrical frustration and tunable long-range interactions, enabling exploration of complex quantum states.

Contribution

It introduces a scheme using Raman-induced subwavelength lattices to naturally combine geometrical frustration with long-range interactions in quantum gases.

Findings

Demonstration of a versatile frustrated Hubbard model with tunable long-range interactions.

Identification of various many-body phases including density-wave and superfluid states.

Observation of broken symmetries in the resulting quantum phases.

Abstract

Geometrical frustration and long-range couplings are key contributors to create quantum phases with different properties throughout physics. We propose a scheme where both ingredients naturally emerge in a Raman induced subwavelength lattice. We first demonstrate that Raman-coupled multicomponent quantum gases can realize a highly versatile frustrated Hubbard Hamiltonian with long-range interactions. The deeply subwavelength lattice period leads to strong long-range interparticle repulsion with tunable range and decay. We numerically demonstrate that the combination of frustration and long-range couplings generates many-body phases of bosons, including a range of density-wave and superfluid phases with broken translational and time reversal symmetries, respectively. Our results thus represent a powerful approach for efficiently combining long-range interactions and frustration in quantum simulations.