2023/08/23 by A. Bermúdez, Daniel González-Cuadra, Bermudez, A. +3 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #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) #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el) #Topological Materials and Phenomena
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2308.12051
openalex publication_date 2023/08/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Ultracold Fermi gases of spin-3/2 atoms provide a clean platform to realise SO(5) models of 4-Fermi interactions in the laboratory. By confining the atoms in a two-dimensional Raman lattice, we show how this system can be used as a flexible quantum simulator of Dirac quantum field theories (QFTs) that combine Gross-Neveu and Thirring interactions with a higher-order topological twist. We show that the lattice model corresponds to a regularization of this QFT with an anisotropic twisted Wilson mass. This allows us to access higher-order topological states protected by a hidden SO(5) symmetry, a remnant of the original rotational symmetry of the 4-Fermi interactions that is not explicitly broken by the lattice discretization. Using large-N methods, we show that the 4-Fermi interactions lead to a rich phase diagram with various competing fermion condensates. Our work opens a route for the implementation of correlated higher-order topological states with tunable interactions that has interesting connections to non-trivial relativistic QFTs of Dirac fermions in D = 2 + 1 dimensions.