Erbium Scientific News

Category for scientific news of the Erbium group

Revealing the topological nature of the bond order wave in a strongly correlated quantum system

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Now published in PRR with collaborators from ICFO, Barcelona! In the recent years, great effort has been devoted toward the study of symmetry-protected topological phases. We show that the bond order wave (BOW) induced by frustration between competing couplings has a nontrivial topological sector in the presence of chiral symmetry. We reveal its topological nature by finding a nonzero string order correlator and a degenerate entanglement spectrum, and design a realistic experimental scheme involving magnetic atoms trapped in an optical lattice. The latter paves the way towards an efficient quantum simulation of topological phases in many-body quantum systems.

The paper can be accessed here: Phys. Rev. Research, and the pre-print here: arXiv

Determination of the scattering length of erbium atoms

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Now published in PRA with collaborators from JILA, Boulder (Colorado, USA), we accurately determine the scattering length for the four bosonic erbium isotopes with highest abundance in the magnetic field range from 0G to 5G. We use the cross-dimensional thermalization technique and extract the scattering length by applying a fit of the complete Enskog equations of change and by utilizing an analytic formula for the so-called number of collisions per re-thermalization. We benchmark our results with the very accurate but experimentally more demanding lattice modulation spectroscopy, confirming the accuracy of our experimental protocol.

The paper can be accessed here: Phys. Rev. A, and the pre-print here: arXiv

Bloch oscillations and matter-wave localization in erbium!

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In our new pre-print, we study Er atoms in a one-dimensional lattice. We use Bloch oscillations to evaluate the role played by the different interaction terms, and in particular by the quantum fluctuations. We additionally observe a transition–driven by interactions–to a state localized to a single lattice plane. To benchmark our results, we developed a discrete one-dimensional extended Gross-Pitaevskii theory. This model is in quantitative agreement with the experiment, additionally revealing, in our parameter regime, the existence of many different phases: macrodroplets occupying single or many lattice sites and two-dimensional bright solitons.

See the pre-print here: arXiv:2205.03280

Revealing the topological nature of the bond order wave in a strongly correlated quantum system

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In collaboration with our colleagues from ICFO in Barcelona, we theoretically investigate the topological properties of the bond order wave in the extended Fermi-Hubbard model. We find that in a finite sized system, a topological order in the bond order wave regime can be stabilized experimentally allowing for the preparation of topologically protected edge modes. We finally propose an experimental scheme for the implementation and detection of this particular quantum phase.

The arXiv link is here

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