Related papers: Dimensional crossover and cold-atom realization of…
In this Letter we study various spin correlated insulating states of F=2 cold atoms in optical lattices. We find that the effective spin exchange interaction due to virtual hopping contains an {\em octopole} coupling between two neighboring…
The detection of topological phases of matter becomes a central issue in recent years. Conventionally, the realization of a specific topological phase in condensed matter physics relies on probing the underlying surface band dispersion or…
In this paper we review some connections recently discovered between topological insulators and certain classes of quantum spin liquids, focusing on two and three spatial dimensions. In two dimensions we show the integer quantum Hall effect…
The superfluid-Mott insulator transition of spin-2 boson atoms with repulsive interaction in an optical lattice in a magnetic field is presented. By using the mean field theory, Mott ground states and phase diagrams of superfluid-Mott…
One of the most remarkable results of quantum mechanics is the fact that many-body quantum systems may exhibit phase transitions even at zero temperature. Quantum fluctuations, deeply rooted in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and not…
Topological phases of matter are among the most intriguing research directions in Condensed Matter Physics. It is known that superconductivity induced on a topological insulator's surface can lead to exotic Majorana modes, the main…
We consider the Bose-Hubbard model on a two-leg ladder under an artificial magnetic field, and investigate the superfluid-to-Mott insulator transition in this setting. Recently, this system has been experimentally realized [M.Atala…
Topological band insulators have recently been discovered in spin-orbit coupled two and three dimensional systems. In this work, we theoretically predict a class of topological Mott insulators where interaction effects play a dominant role.…
We design an interaction-driven topological insulator for fermionic cold atoms in an optical lattice, that is, we pose the question of whether we can realize in a continuous space a spontaneous symmetry breaking induced by the inter-atom…
For a system at a temperature of absolute zero, all thermal fluctuations are frozen out, while quantum fluctuations prevail. These microscopic quantum fluctuations can induce a macroscopic phase transition in the ground state of a many-body…
Quantum phases and phase transitions of weakly- to strongly-interacting bosonic atoms in deep to shallow optical lattices are described by a {\it single multi-orbital mean-field approach in real space}. For weakly-interacting bosons in 1D,…
We investigate the interplay between topological effects and Mott physics in two dimensions on a graphene-like lattice, via a tight-binding model containing an anisotropic spin-orbit coupling on the next-nearest-neighbour links and the…
A two-dimensional system of atoms in an anisotropic optical lattice is studied theoretically. If the system is finite in one direction, it is shown to exhibit a transition between a two-dimensional superfluid and a one-dimensional Mott…
We investigate the superfluid-insulator transition of one-dimensional interacting Bosons in both deep and shallow periodic potentials. We compare a theoretical analysis based on Monte-Carlo simulations in continuum space and Luttinger…
We propose an experimental scheme to simulate and detect the properties of time-reversal invariant topological insulators, using cold atoms trapped in one-dimensional bichromatic optical lattices. This system is described by a…
Most Mott systems display a low-temperature phase coexistence region around the metal-insulator transition. The domain walls separating the respective phases have very recently been observed both in simulations and in experiments,…
We describe the two-dimensional Mott transition in a Hubbard-like model with nearest neighbors interactions based on a recent solution to the Zamolodchikov tetrahedron equation, which extends the notion of integrability to two-dimensional…
It has been reported that upon doping a Mott insulator, there can be a crossover to a pseudogaped metallic phase followed by a first-order transition to another thermodynamically stable metallic phase. We call this first-order metal-metal…
Quantum gases in optical lattices offer an opportunity to experimentally realize and explore condensed matter models in a clean, tunable system. We investigate the Bose-Hubbard model on a microscopic level using single atom-single lattice…
Interfaces between normal and topological insulators are bound to host metallic states that are protected by time-reversal symmetry and are therefore robust against disorder and interface reconstruction. Two-dimensional topological…