Skyrmion Ground States of Rapidly Rotating Few-Fermion Systems

Abstract

We show that ultracold fermions in an artificial magnetic field open up a new window to the physics of the spinful fractional quantum Hall effect. We numerically study the lowest energy states of strongly interacting few-fermion systems in rapidly rotating optical microtraps. We find that skyrmion-like ground states with locally ferromagnetic, long-range spin textures emerge. To realize such states experimentally, rotating microtraps with higher-order angular momentum components may be used to prepare fermionic particles in a lowest Landau level. We find parameter regimes in which skyrmion-like ground states should be accessible in current experiments and demonstrate an adiabatic pathway for their preparation in a rapidly rotating harmonic trap. The addition of long range interactions will lead to an even richer interplay between spin textures and fractional quantum Hall physics.

15 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Itinerant Ferromagnetism in a Fermi Gas of Ultracold Atoms
• Stirring trapped atoms into fractional quantum Hall puddles
• Creating fractional quantum Hall states with atomic clusters using light-assisted insertion of angular momentum

Cited by in corpus (12)

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• Realization of a fractional quantum Hall state with ultracold atoms
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• Observation of Cooper Pairs in a Mesoscopic 2D Fermi Gas
• Bosonic Pfaffian State in the Hofstadter-Bose-Hubbard Model
• Emergent interaction-driven elliptic flow of few fermionic atoms
• Anyonic molecules in atomic fractional quantum Hall liquids: a quantitative probe of fractional charge and anyonic statistics
• Preparation of the 1/2-Laughlin state with atoms in a rotating trap
• Exact closed-form analytic wave functions in two dimensions: Contact-interacting fermionic spinful ultracold atoms in a rapidly rotating trap
• Ferromagnetism and Skyrmions in the Hofstadter-Fermi-Hubbard Model
• Scale and conformal invariance in rotating interacting few-fermion systems
• Wave-function microscopy: Derivation and anatomy of exact algebraic spinful wave functions and full Wigner-molecular spectra of a few highly correlated rapidly rotating ultracold fermionic atoms