Pattern formation in mixtures of ultracold atoms in optical lattices

Abstract

Regular pattern formation is ubiquitous in nature; it occurs in biological, physical, and materials science systems. Here we propose a set of experiments with ultracold atoms that show how to examine different types of pattern formation. In particular, we show how one can see the analog of labyrinthine patterns (so-called quantum emulsions) in mixtures of light and heavy atoms (that tend to phase separate) by tuning the trap potential and we show how complex geometrically ordered patterns emerge (when the mixtures do not phase separate), which could be employed for low-temperature thermometry. The complex physical mechanisms for the pattern formation at zero temperature are understood within a theoretical analysis called the local density approximation.

5 pages, 4 figures, typeset in ReVTeX

References in corpus (3)

• Quantum degenerate two-species Fermi-Fermi mixture coexisting with a Bose-Einstein condensate
• Quantum phases in mixtures of fermionic atoms
• Segregation in the asymmetric Hubbard model

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• Resonant enhancement of particle emission from a parametrically driven condensate in a one-dimensional lattice
• Efficiency for preforming molecules from mixtures of light Fermi and heavy Bose atoms in optical lattices: the strong-coupling-expansion method
• The Ising version of the t-J model
• Unsupervised Machine Learning Phase Classification for Falicov-Kimball Model
• Robust finite-temperature disordered Mott insulating phases in inhomogeneous Fermi-Fermi mixtures with density and mass imbalance