A one-dimensional liquid of fermions with tunable spin

Abstract

Correlations in systems with spin degree of freedom are at the heart of fundamental phenomena, ranging from magnetism to superconductivity. The e ects of correlations depend strongly on dimensionality, a striking example being one-dimensional (1D) electronic systems, extensively studied theoretically over the past fifty years 1-7 . However, the experimental investigation of the role of spin multiplicity in 1D fermions-and especially for more than two spin components-is still lacking. Here we report on the realization of 1D, strongly correlated liquids of ultracold fermions interacting repulsively within SU(N) symmetry, with a tunable number N of spin components. We observe that static and dynamic properties of the system deviate from those of ideal fermions and, for N > 2, from those of a spin-1/2 Luttinger liquid. In the large-N limit, the system exhibits properties of a bosonic spinless liquid. Our results provide a testing ground for many-body theories and may lead to the observation of fundamental 1D e ects 8 . One-dimensional quantum systems show specific, sometimes counterintuitive behaviours that are absent in the 3D world. These behaviours, predicted by many-body models of interacting bosons 9 and fermions 2-4 , include the 'fermionization' of bosons 10 and the separation of spin and density (most commonly referred to as 'charge') branches in the excitation spectrum of interacting fermions. The last phenomenon is predicted within the celebrated Luttinger liquid model 5 , which describes the low-energy excitations of interacting spin-1/2 fermions. Although the Luttinger approach describes qualitatively the physics of a number of 1D systems 11,12 , the problem of how to extend it to a more detailed description of real systems has puzzled physicists over the years 7 . In this exploration the physics of spin has played a key role.Ultracold atoms have proved to be a precious resource to study 1D physics, as they afford exceptional control over experimental parameters. Most of the experiments so far have been performed with spinless bosons, which for instance led to the realization of a Tonks-Girardeau gas 13,14 . On the other hand, 1D ultracold fermions are a promising system to observe a number of elusive phenomena, such as Stoner's itinerant ferromagnetism 15 and the physics of spin-incoherent Luttinger liquids 6 . However, only a few pioneering works, dealing with spin-1/2 particles [16][17][18] , have been reported so far.In parallel, ultracold two-electron atoms have been recently proposed for the realization of large-spin systems with SU(N ) interaction symmetry 19,20 , and the first experimental investigations have been reported 21 . This novel platform enables the simulation of 1D systems with a high degree of complexity, including spin-orbitcoupled materials 22 or SU(N ) Heisenberg and Hubbard chains 23,24 . Moreover, the investigation of these multi-component fermions is relevant for the simulation of field theories with extended SU(N ) symmetries 25 . In this Letter we report on the realization of ...

Distinguishability, degeneracy, and correlations in three harmonically trapped bosons in one dimension

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High-momentum tails as magnetic-structure probes for strongly correlatedSU(κ)fermionic mixtures in one-dimensional traps

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“…The inter-atomic interactions which depend (primarily) on the electronic configurations thus become independent of nuclear spins. This realizes the so-called SU (N ) symmetries, where N is the number of nuclear spin components [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. The OFR relies on the atoms residing on both the s and p-states which possess slight different Landé g-factors [16,17], thus allowing tuning by external magnetic field.…”