Schedule Oct 15, 2010
Bose-Fermi Solid and Its Quantum Melting in a One-dimensional Optical Lattice
Bin Wang (Univ. Maryland)

Bin Wang1, Daw-Wei Wang2, and Sankar Das Sarma1
1 Condensed Matter Theory Center, Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA
2 Physics Department and NCTS, National Tsing-Hua University, Hsinchu 30013, Taiwan

We investigate the quantum phase diagram of Bose-Fermi mixtures of ultracold dipolar particles trapped in one-dimensional optical lattices in the thermodynamic limit. With the presence of nearest-neighbor (N.N.) interactions, a long-ranged ordered crystalline phase (Bose-Fermi solid) is found stabilized between a Mott insulator of bosons and a band-insulator of fermions in the limit of weak inter-site tunneling (J). When J is increased, such a Bose-Fermi solid can be quantum melted into a Bose-Fermi liquid through either a two-stage or a three-stage transition, depending on whether the crystalline order is dominated by the N.N. interaction between fermions or bosons. These properties can be understood as quantum competition between a pseudo-spin frustration and a pseudo-spin-charge separation, qualitatively different from the classical picture of solid-liquid phase transition.

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