Chiral magnetism and spontaneous spin Hall effect of interacting Bose superfluids

Xiaopeng Li, Stefan S. Natu, Arun Paramekanti () and S. Das Sarma
Additional contact information
Xiaopeng Li: Condensed Matter Theory Center and Joint Quantum Institute, University of Maryland
Stefan S. Natu: Condensed Matter Theory Center and Joint Quantum Institute, University of Maryland
Arun Paramekanti: University of Toronto
S. Das Sarma: Condensed Matter Theory Center and Joint Quantum Institute, University of Maryland

Nature Communications, 2014, vol. 5, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract Recent experiments on ultracold atoms in optical lattices have synthesized a variety of tunable bands with degenerate double-well structures in momentum space. Such degeneracies in the single-particle spectrum strongly enhance quantum fluctuations, and often lead to exotic many-body ground states. Here we consider weakly interacting spinor Bose gases in such bands, and discover a universal quantum ‘order by disorder’ phenomenon which selects a novel superfluid with chiral spin order displaying remarkable properties such as spontaneous spin Hall effect and momentum space antiferromagnetism. For bosons in the excited Dirac band of a hexagonal lattice, such a state supports staggered spin loop currents in real space. We show that Bloch oscillations provide a powerful dynamical route to quantum state preparation of such a chiral spin superfluid. Our predictions can be readily tested in spin-resolved time-of-flight experiments.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6174 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:5:y:2014:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms6174

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms6174

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().