Emergent devil's staircase without particle-hole symmetry in Rydberg quantum gases with competing attractive and repulsive interactions

Lan, Zhihao and Minář, Jiří and Levi, Emanuele and Li, Weibin and Lesanovsky, Igor (2015) Emergent devil's staircase without particle-hole symmetry in Rydberg quantum gases with competing attractive and repulsive interactions. Physical Review Letters, 115 . 203001/1-203001/5. ISSN 1079-7114

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Abstract

The devil's staircase is a fractal structure that characterizes the ground state of one-dimensional classical lattice gases with long-range repulsive convex interactions. Its plateaus mark regions of stability for specific filling fractions which are controlled by a chemical potential. Typically such staircase has an explicit particle-hole symmetry, i.e., the staircase at more than half-filling can be trivially extracted from the one at less than half filling by exchanging the roles of holes and particles. Here we introduce a quantum spin chain with competing short-range attractive and long-range repulsive interactions, i.e. a non-convex potential. In the classical limit the ground state features generalized Wigner crystals that --- depending on the filling fraction --- are either composed of dimer particles or dimer holes which results in an emergent complete devil's staircase without explicit particle-hole symmetry of the underlying microscopic model. In our system the particle-hole symmetry is lifted due to the fact that the staircase is controlled through a two-body interaction rather than a one-body chemical potential. The introduction of quantum fluctuations through a transverse field melts the staircase and ultimately makes the system enter a paramagnetic phase. For intermediate transverse field strengths, however, we identify a region, where the density-density correlations suggest the emergence of quasi long-range order. We discuss how this physics can be explored with Rydberg-dressed atoms held in a lattice.

Item Type: Article
RIS ID: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/767133
Schools/Departments: University of Nottingham, UK > Faculty of Science > School of Physics and Astronomy
Identification Number: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.203001
Depositing User: Lan, Zhihao
Date Deposited: 03 Dec 2015 14:23
Last Modified: 04 May 2020 17:23
URI: https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/30988

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