Bulletin of the American Physical Society
53rd Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics
Volume 67, Number 7
Monday–Friday, May 30–June 3 2022; Orlando, Florida
Session V01: Poster Session III (4:00-6:00pm, EDT)
4:00 PM,
Thursday, June 2, 2022
Room: Grand Ballroom C
Abstract: V01.00062 : Discontinuous Phase Transition in a Strongly Correlated Driven Lattice*
Presenter:
Lee C Reeve
(Univ of Cambridge)
Authors:
Lee C Reeve
(Univ of Cambridge)
Shaurya A Bhave
(Univ of Cambridge)
Jr-Chiun Yu
(Univ of Cambridge)
Emmanuel Gottlob
(Univ of Cambridge)
Georgia Nixon
(Univ of Cambridge)
Bo Song
(Univ of Cambridge)
Ulrich Schneider
(Univ of Cambridge)
Here, we realise a discontinuous quantum phase transition in an optical lattice with ultracold atoms. By shaking the optical lattice, we hybridise the lowest two bands, leading to a transition from a Mott insulator to a superfluid with staggered phase order, which is called a π-superfluid.
Crucially, the transition from the original Mott insulator in the lowest band to the resulting superfluid in the excited band can be first order, because the non-staggered order in the Mott insulator is incompatible with the staggered order of this superfluid – so the system has to choose one. We directly observed the metastability and hysteresis associated with this first-order transition by monitoring how fast one phase sweeps into another, or not.
Our results agree well with numerical simulations, and open a new avenue towards simulating false-vacuum decay as well as exploring the role of quantum fluctuations in strongly correlated systems.
*This work was partly funded by the European Commission ERC Starting Grant QUASICRYSTAL, the EPSRC Grant (EP/R044627/1), and the Programme Grant DesOEQ (EP/P009565/1).
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