Wilson Fermions and Axion Electrodynamics in Optical Lattices

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 (2)

• Topological Phases for Fermionic Cold Atoms on the Lieb Lattice
• Topological superfluids on a lattice with non-Abelian gauge fields