Engineering quantum states of fermionic many-body systems

<p>Controlling and stabilising collective phases of many-body quantum systems is a problem of deep fundamental and technological interest. In this thesis, we perform a theoretical investigation on how useful quantum phases may be engineered in strongly correlated fermionic lattice systems, esp...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Coulthard, J
Other Authors: Jaksch, D
Format: Thesis
Language:English
Published: 2018
Subjects:
Description
Summary:<p>Controlling and stabilising collective phases of many-body quantum systems is a problem of deep fundamental and technological interest. In this thesis, we perform a theoretical investigation on how useful quantum phases may be engineered in strongly correlated fermionic lattice systems, especially through periodic driving.</p> <p>We first compute the phase diagram of the one-dimensional <em>t–J</em> model with the addition of non-standard pair hopping terms. We show that at dilute fillings these terms enhance superconductivity while, counter- intuitively, suppressing it at large fillings. We argue that this is due to dynamical constraints originating from the fact that local pairs cannot overlap. We conjecture that these constraints may play a more significant role in the physics of two-dimensional systems where the t–J model is studied as a candidate model of high-<em>T<sub>c</sub></em> superconductivity. We begin to investigate these dynamical constraints on a ladder geometry.</p> <p>We then study the fermionic Hubbard model under periodic driving. We show that the driving induces a strong and robust singlet-pairing effect consistent with a superconducting state. This could provide a new mechanism for light-induced superconductivity in some classes of strongly cor- related materials. We show using Floquet theory that the dynamics of the driven Hubbard model are described precisely by the <em>t–J</em> model studied in the previous section. As the driven Hubbard model is also implementable with ultracold fermions in an optical lattice, our results could lead to their use as a quantum simulator for a broad class of candidate models for high-<em>T<sub>c</sub></em> superconductivity.</p>