Spinor Bosonic Atoms in Optical Lattices: Symmetry Breaking and Fractionalization

The Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian of spin-2 cold bosons with repulsive interaction in an optical lattice is proposed. After neglecting the hopping term, the site-independent Hamiltonian and its energy eigenvalues and eigenstates are obtained. We consider the hopping term as a perturbation to do the calculations in second order and draw the phase diagrams for different cases. The phase diagrams show that there is a phase transition from Mott insulator with integer number bosons to ...

We show that there are three possible phases for a spin-2 spinor Bose condensate, one more compared to the spin-1 case. The order parameters of these phases are the spontaneous magnetization and the singlet pair amplitude. Current estimates of scattering lengths show that all three phases have realizations in optically trapped alkali atoms. There is also a one-to-one correspondence between the structure of a spin-2 spinor Bose condensate and that of a d-wave BCS superfluid.

We study the phase diagram of spin-one polar condensates in a two dimensional optical lattice with magnetic anisotropy. We show that the topological binding of vorticity to nematic disclinations allows for a rich variety of phase transitions. These include Kosterlitz-Thouless-like transitions with a superfluid stiffness jump that can be experimentally tuned to take a continuous set of values, and a new cascaded Kosterlitz-Thouless transition, characterized by two divergent le...

In this paper, we show that for sufficiently strong atomic interactions, there exist analytical solutions of current-carrying nonlinear Bloch states at the Brillouin zone edge to the model of spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) with symmetric spin interaction loaded into optical lattices. These simple but generic exact solutions provide an analytical demonstration of some intriguing properties which have neither an analog in the regular BEC lattice systems nor...

We theoretically investigate zero-temperature magnetic ordering of mixtures of spin-1 (alkali atoms) and spin-0 (alkaline-earth atoms) bosons in a three-dimensional optical lattice. With the single-mode approximation for the spin-1 bosons, we obtain an effective Bose-Hubbard model for describing the heteronuclear mixtures in optical lattices. By controlling the interspecies interactions between alkali and alkaline-earth atoms, we map out complete phase diagrams of the system ...

We investigate magnetic properties of Mott-insulating phases of ultracold Bose and Fermi spinor gases in optical lattices. We consider in particular the F=2 Bose gas, and the F=3/2 and F=5/2 Fermi gases. We derive effective spin Hamiltonians for one and two atoms per site and discuss the possibilities of manipulating the magnetic properties of the system using optical Feshbach resonances. We discuss low temperature quantum phases of a 87Rb gas in the F=2 hyperfine state, as w...

Basic properties of cold Bose atoms in optical lattices are reviewed. The main principles of correct self-consistent description of arbitrary systems with Bose-Einstein condensate are formulated. Theoretical methods for describing regular periodic lattices are presented. A special attention is paid to the discussion of Bose-atom properties in the frame of the boson Hubbard model. Optical lattices with arbitrary strong disorder, induced by random potentials, are treated. Possi...

We investigate spin-order of ultracold bosons in an optical lattice by means of Dynamical Mean-Field Theory. A rich phase diagram with anisotropic magnetic order is found, both for the ground state and at finite temperatures. Within the Mott insulator, a ferromagnetic to antiferromagnetic transition can be tuned using a spin-dependent optical lattice. In addition we find a supersolid phase, in which superfluidity coexists with antiferromagnetic spin order. We present detailed...

We investigate the ground-state properties of spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates in spin-dependent optical lattices. The competition between the spin-orbit coupling strength and the depth of the optical lattice leads to a rich phase diagram. Without spin-orbit coupling, the spin-dependent optical lattices separate the condensates into alternating spin domains with opposite magnetization directions. With relatively weak spin-orbit coupling, the spin domain wall is dr...

We review the nature of superfluid ground states and the universality of their properties with emphasis to Bose Einstein Condensate systems in atomic physics. We then study the superfluid Mott transition in such systems. We find that there could be two types of Mott transitions and phases. One of them was described long ago and corresponds to suppression of Josephson tunneling within superfluids sitting at each well. On the other hand, the conditions of optical lattice BEC ex...