Spontaneous quantum Hall effect in an atomic spinor Bose-Fermi mixture

Abstract

We study a mixture of spin-$1$ bosonic and spin-$1/2$ fermionic cold atoms, e.g., ${}^{87}$Rb and ${}^6$Li, confined in a triangular optical lattice. With fermions at $3/4$ filling, Fermi surface nesting leads to spontaneous formation of various spin textures of bosons in the ground state, such as collinear, coplanar and even non-coplanar spin orders. The phase diagram is mapped out with varying boson tunneling and Bose-Fermi interactions. Most significantly, in one non-coplanar state the mixture is found to exhibit a spontaneous quantum Hall effect in fermions and crystalline superfluidity in bosons, both driven by interaction.

7 pages, 5 figures, updated version, accepted by Phys. Rev. Lett

References in corpus (8)

• Measuring the Chern number of Hofstadter bands with ultracold bosonic atoms
• Spin-Injection Spectroscopy of a Spin-Orbit Coupled Fermi Gas
• Tunable gauge potential for neutral and spinless particles in driven lattices
• Scalar spin chirality and quantum Hall effect on a triangular lattice
• Non-Abelian gauge fields and topological insulators in shaken optical lattices
• Optical Abelian Lattice Gauge Theories
• Spontaneous quantum Hall effect via thermally induced quadratic Fermi point
• Supersolidity of cold-atom Bose-Fermi mixtures in optical lattices

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Coherent heteronuclear spin dynamics in an ultracold spin-1 mixture
• Damping of long wavelength collective modes in spinor Bose-Fermi mixtures