Formation and detection of a chiral orbital Bose liquid in an optical lattice

Abstract

Recent experiments on $p$-orbital atomic bosons have suggested the emergence of a spectacular ultracold superfluid with staggered orbital currents in optical lattices. This raises fundamental questions like the effects of collective thermal fluctuations, and how to directly observe such chiral order. Here, we show via Monte Carlo simulations that thermal fluctuations destroy this superfluid in an unexpected two-step process, unveiling an intermediate normal phase with spontaneously broken time-reversal symmetry, dubbed "chiral Bose liquid". For integer fillings ($n\ge 2$) in the chiral Mott regime, thermal fluctuations are captured by an effective orbital Ising model, and Onsager's powerful exact solution is adopted to determine the transition from this intermediate liquid to the para-orbital normal phase at high temperature. A suitable lattice quench is designed to convert the staggered angular momentum, previously thought by experts difficult to directly probe, into coherent orbital oscillations, providing a smoking-gun signature of chiral order.

9 pages

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Cited by in corpus (18)

• Physics of higher orbital bands in optical lattices: a review
• Observing Chiral Superfluid Order by Matter-Wave Interference
• Evidence of Potts-Nematic Superfluidity in a Hexagonal $s{p}^2$ Optical Lattice
• Orbital optical lattices with bosons
• π-flux Dirac bosons and topological edge excitations in a bosonic chiral p-wave superfluid
• Chiral spin superfluidity and spontaneous spin Hall effect of interacting bosons
• Cluster Gutzwiller study of Bose-Hubbard ladder: ground-state phase diagram and many-body Landau-Zener dynamics
• Orbital many-body dynamics of bosons in the second Bloch band of an optical lattice
• Rotation-symmetry-enforced coupling of spin and angular momentum for p-orbital bosons
• The nonlinear Dirac equation in Bose-Einstein condensates: Superfluid fluctuations and emergent theories from relativistic linear stability equations
• Dynamics of Bose-Einstein Recondensation in Higher Bands
• Chiral orbital order of interacting bosons without higher bands
• Unconventional Bose-Einstein Condensation in a System of Two-species Bosons in the $p$-orbital Bands of a Bipartite Lattice
• Nematic order driven by superconducting correlations
• Bose-Hubbard model with occupation-parity couplings
• Magnetic phases of orbital bipartite optical lattices
• Simulating the Palmer-Chalker state in an orbital superfluid
• Collisional scattering of strongly interacting D-band Feshbach molecules in optical lattices