| Literature DB >> 25300774 |
Xiaopeng Li1, Stefan S Natu1, Arun Paramekanti2, S Das Sarma1.
Abstract
Recent experiments on ultracold atoms in optical lattices have synthesized a variety of tunable bands with degenerate double-well structures in momentum space. Such degeneracies in the single-particle spectrum strongly enhance quantum fluctuations, and often lead to exotic many-body ground states. Here we consider weakly interacting spinor Bose gases in such bands, and discover a universal quantum 'order by disorder' phenomenon which selects a novel superfluid with chiral spin order displaying remarkable properties such as spontaneous spin Hall effect and momentum space antiferromagnetism. For bosons in the excited Dirac band of a hexagonal lattice, such a state supports staggered spin loop currents in real space. We show that Bloch oscillations provide a powerful dynamical route to quantum state preparation of such a chiral spin superfluid. Our predictions can be readily tested in spin-resolved time-of-flight experiments.Year: 2014 PMID: 25300774 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms6174
Source DB: PubMed Journal: Nat Commun ISSN: 2041-1723 Impact factor: 14.919