Meta-nematic, smectic and crystalline phases of dipolar fermions in an optical lattice

Abstract

It has been suggested that some strongly correlated matter might be understood qualitatively in terms of liquid crystalline phases intervening between the Fermi gas and the Wigner crystal or Mott insulator. We propose a tunable realisation of this soft quantum matter physics in an ultra-cold gas. It uses optical lattices and dipolar interactions to realise a particularly simple model. Our analysis reveals a rich phase diagram featuring a meta-nematic transition where the Fermi liquid changes dimensionality; a smectic phase (stripes); and a crystalline, `checkerboard' phase.

improved figure, added references, text shortened, typos corrected; to appear in Physical Review A (Rapid Communications)

References in corpus (10)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• A High Phase-Space-Density Gas of Polar Molecules
• Bose-Einstein condensation of chromium
• Stabilizing a purely dipolar quantum gas against collapse
• Magneto-electrostatic trapping of ground state OH molecules
• Formation of Electronic Nematic Phase in Interacting Systems
• Deconfinement in a 2D optical lattice of coupled 1D boson systems
• Quantitative determination of the Hubbard model phase diagram from optical lattice experiments by two-parameter scaling
• Electron Interactions and Transport Between Coupled Quantum Hall Edges
• Confined coherence in quasi-one-dimensional metals