2020/11/17 by L. D. Ziegler, Ziegler, L., Emanuele Tirrito +7
Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Lattice (hep-lat) #Quantum Gases (cond-mat.quant-gas) #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el) #Topological Materials and Phenomena
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2011.08744
openalex publication_date 2020/11/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
We show that ultra-cold atoms with synthetic spin-orbit coupling in Raman lattices can be used as versatile quantum simulators to explore the connections between correlated Chern insulators and strongly-coupled four-Fermi field theories related to the Gross-Neveu model in (2+1) dimensions. Exploiting this multidisciplinary perspective, we identify a large-N quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) effect in absence of any external magnetic field, and use it to delimit regions in parameter space where these correlated topological phases appear, the boundaries of which are controlled by strongly-coupled fixed points of the four-Fermi relativistic field theory. We further show how, for strong interactions, the QAH effect gives way to magnetic phases described by a two-dimensional quantum compass model in a transverse field. We present a detailed description of the phase diagram using the large-N effective potential, and variational techniques such as projected entangled pairs.