Realizing discontinuous quantum phase transitions in a strongly-correlated driven optical lattice

Abstract

Discontinuous quantum phase transitions and the associated metastability play central roles in diverse areas of physics ranging from ferromagnetism to false vacuum decay in the early universe. Using strongly-interacting ultracold atoms in an optical lattice, we realize a driven many-body system whose quantum phase transition can be tuned from continuous to discontinuous. Resonant shaking of a one-dimensional optical lattice hybridizes the lowest two Bloch bands, driving a novel transition from a Mott insulator to a $\pi$-superfluid, i.e., a superfluid state with staggered phase order. For weak shaking amplitudes, this transition is discontinuous (first-order) and the system can remain frozen in a metastable state, whereas for strong shaking, it undergoes a continuous transition toward a $\pi$-superfluid. Our observations of this metastability and hysteresis are in good quantitative agreement with numerical simulations and pave the way for exploring the crucial role of quantum fluctuations in discontinuous transitions.

5 pages, 4 figures + Supplementary

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Cited by in corpus (22)

• Observation of false vacuum decay via bubble formation in ferromagnetic superfluids
• Interface dynamics in the two-dimensional quantum Ising model
• Counterdiabatic Driving for Periodically Driven Systems
• Analog vacuum decay from vacuum initial conditions
• False vacuum decay and nucleation dynamics in neutral atom systems
• Monte Carlo matrix-product-state approach to the false vacuum decay in the monitored quantum Ising chain
• Unravelling Metastable Markovian Open Quantum Systems
• Generalized cold-atom simulators for vacuum decay
• Floquet-heating-induced Bose condensation in a scar-like mode of an open driven optical-lattice system
• Suppression of inter-band heating for random driving
• Emergence of a tunable crystalline order in a Floquet-Bloch system from a parametric instability
• Instabilities of interacting matter waves in optical lattices with Floquet driving
• Superfluid-Mott insulator quantum phase transition in a cavity optomagnonic system
• Long-lived oscillations of metastable states in neutral atom systems
• Individually tunable tunnelling coefficients in optical lattices using local periodic driving
• Dynamics of a Nonequilibrium Discontinuous Quantum Phase Transition in a Spinor Bose-Einstein Condensate
• Spectroscopic evidence for engineered hadron formation in repulsive fermionic $\text{SU}(N)$ Hubbard Models
• Fermionization of a Few-Body Bose System Immersed into a Bose-Einstein Condensate
• Competing order in two-band Bose-Hubbard chains with extended-range interactions
• Density-and-phase domain walls in a condensate with dynamical gauge potentials
• Interference-induced suppression of particle emission from a Bose-Einstein condensate in lattice with time-periodic modulations
• Magnon Nesting in Driven Two-Dimensional Quantum Magnets