Liquid crystal phases of two-dimensional dipolar gases and Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless melting

Abstract

Liquid crystals are phases of matter intermediate between crystals and liquids. Whereas classical liquid crystals have been known for a long time and are used in electro-optical displays, much less is known about their quantum counterparts. There is growing evidence that quantum liquid crystals play a central role in many electron systems including high temperature superconductors, but a quantitative understanding is lacking due to disorder and other complications. Here, we analyse the quantum phase diagram of a two-dimensional dipolar gas, which exhibits stripe, nematic and supersolid phases. We calculate the stiffness constants determining the stability of the nematic and stripe phases, and the melting of the stripes set by the proliferation of topological defects is analysed microscopically. Our results for the critical temperatures of these phases demonstrate that a controlled study of the interplay between quantum liquid and superfluid phases is within experimental reach for the first time, using dipolar gases.

8 pages, 6 figures

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Cited by in corpus (16)

• Evaporation of microwave-shielded polar molecules to quantum degeneracy
• Dual gauge field theory of quantum liquid crystals in two dimensions
• Dual gauge field theory of quantum liquid crystals in three dimensions
• Ultracold Sticky Collisions: Theoretical and Experimental Status
• Vortices and vortex lattices in quantum ferrofluids
• Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless Transition in Two-Dimensional Dipolar Stripes
• Dipolar condensates with tilted dipoles in a pancake-shaped confinement
• Quantum and thermal melting of stripe forming systems with competing long ranged interactions
• Physical dipoles and second order perturbation theory for dipolar fermions in two dimensions
• Melting of the two-dimensional solid phase in the Gaussian-core model
• Competing many-body instabilities in two-dimensional dipolar Fermi gases
• Stabilising Fulde-Ferrel-Larkin-Ovchinnikov Superfluidity with long-range Interactions in a mixed dimensional Bose-Fermi System
• Dipolar fermions in a multilayer geometry
• Mixed parity pairing in a dipolar gas
• Compensation in trilayered anisotropic 6-state clock model
• Nonequilibrium tricritical behaviour in anisotropic XY ferromagnet driven by elliptically polarised propagating magnetic field wave