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Chiral Orbital Order of Interacting Bosons Without Higher Bands by Di Liberto, Marco; Goldman, Nathan is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Chiral Orbital Order of Interacting Bosons Without Higher Bands about?

Ultracold atoms loaded into higher Bloch bands provide an elegant setting for realizing many-body quantum states that spontaneously break time-reversal symmetry through the formation of chiral orbital order. The applicability of this strategy remains nonetheless limited due to the finite lifetime of atoms in high-energy bands. Here we introduce an alternative framework, suitable for bosonic gases, which builds on assembling square plaquettes pierced by a $\pi$-flux (half a magnetic-flux quantum). This setting is shown to be formally equivalent to an interacting bosonic gas loaded into $p$ orbitals, and we explore the consequences of the resulting chiral orbital order, both for weak and strong onsite interactions. We demonstrate the emergence of a chiral superfluid vortex lattice, exhibiting a long-lived gapped collective mode that is characterized by local chiral currents. This chiral superfluid phase is shown to undergo a phase transition to a chiral Mott insulator for sufficiently strong interactions. Our work establishes coupled $\pi$-flux plaquettes as a practical route for the emergence of orbital order and chiral phases of matter.

Author

Di Liberto, Marco; Goldman, Nathan

Published

2021

Language

EN