Wilson Fermions and Axion Electrodynamics in Optical Lattices
arXiv:1004.5101 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.190404
Abstract
The formulation of massless relativistic fermions in lattice gauge theories is hampered by the fundamental problem of species doubling, namely, the rise of spurious fermions modifying the underlying physics. A suitable tailoring of the fermion masses prevents such abundance of species, and leads to the so-called Wilson fermions. Here we show that ultracold atoms provide us with the first controllable realization of these paradigmatic fermions, thus generating a quantum simulator of fermionic lattice gauge theories. We describe a novel scheme that exploits laser-assisted tunneling in a cubic optical superlattice to design the Wilson fermion masses. The high versatility of this proposal allows us to explore a variety of interesting phases in three-dimensional topological insulators, and to test the remarkable predictions of axion electrodynamics.
RevTex4 file, color figures, slightly longer than the published version
References in corpus (7)
- Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
- Topological Insulators with Inversion Symmetry
- Topological Field Theory of Time-Reversal Invariant Insulators
- Observation of Phase Separation in a Strongly-Interacting Imbalanced Fermi Gas
- Simulation and detection of Dirac fermions with cold atoms in an optical lattice
- Measuring the one-particle excitations of ultracold fermionic atoms by stimulated Raman spectroscopy
- Topological Insulators and Metals in Atomic Optical Lattices
Cited by in corpus (22)
- Topological Quantum Matter with Ultracold Gases in Optical Lattices
- A cold-atom quantum simulator for SU(2) Yang-Mills lattice gauge theory
- Digital quantum simulation of spin models with circuit quantum electrodynamics
- Topological Phases for Fermionic Cold Atoms on the Lieb Lattice
- Direct imaging of topological edge states in cold-atom systems
- Simulating 2+1d Lattice QED with dynamical matter using ultracold atoms
- Towards Quantum Simulating QCD
- Rydberg-Atom Quantum Simulation and Chern Number Characterization of a Topological Mott Insulator
- Topological phases in a two-dimensional lattice: Magnetic field versus spin-orbit coupling
- Emergent pseudospin-1 Maxwell fermions with a threefold degeneracy in optical lattices
- Relativistic quantum effects of Dirac particles simulated by ultracold atoms
- Simulating Quantum Fields with Cavity QED
- Topological superfluids on a lattice with non-Abelian gauge fields
- Confinement and Fermion Doubling Problem in Dirac-like Hamiltonians
- Identifying topological edge states in 2D optical lattices using light scattering
- Simulation and measurement of the fractional particle number in one-dimensional optical lattices
- Quantum Simulation of Tunneling in Small Systems
- Topological Wilson-loop area law manifested using a superposition of loops
- Energy spectra of two interacting fermions with spin-orbit coupling in a harmonic trap
- Exact diagonalization of cubic lattice models in commensurate Abelian magnetic fluxes and translational invariant non-Abelian potentials
- Hidden-symmetry-protected Z_2 topological insulator in a cubic lattice
- Spin Excitation Spectra of Spin-Orbit Coupled Bosons in Optical Lattice