Fully Frustrated Cold Atoms

TL;DR

This paper proposes a cold atom setup to study fully frustrated Josephson Junction arrays, demonstrating how to observe complex phase transitions using momentum distribution measurements and supporting results with numerical simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a cold atom realization of FF-JJA systems and shows how to detect coupled Ising and BKT transitions through standard measurements.

Findings

Both Ising and BKT transitions can be observed in cold atom experiments.

Numerical results support the feasibility of detecting these phase transitions.

The self-consistent spin-wave approximation effectively models the system's behavior.

Abstract

Fully frustrated Josephson Junction arrays (FF-JJA's) exhibit a subtle compound phase transition in which an Ising transition associated with discrete broken translational symmetry and a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transition associated with quasi-long-range phase coherence occur nearly simultaneously. In this Letter we discuss a cold atom realization of the FF-JJA system. We demonstrate that both orders can be studied by standard momentum-distribution-function measurements and present numerical results, based on a successful self-consistent spin-wave approximation, that illustrate the expected behavior of observables.