Orbital is a degree of freedom independent of charge and spin, which is
characterized by orbital degeneracy and spatial anisotropy. It plays
important roles in magnetism and superconductivity in transition metal
oxides. Recently, cold atom optical lattices have provided a new
opportunity to investigate orbital physics. In this talk, we will
present many novel features in such systems that do not appear in
transition metal oxides as follows. Bosons, as recently demonstrated in
experiments, can be pumped into high orbital bands and stay with a long
life time. We will show that such meta-stable states of bosons exhibit a
class of novel superfluid states with complex-valued wavefunctions
spontaneously breaking time reversal symmetry, thus are beyond Feynman's
celebrated argument of the positive-definitiveness of many-body ground
state wavefunctions of bosons. For fermions, we will focus on the
px,y orbital system of the honeycomb lattice, which exhibits
fundamentally different behavior from that in the pz system of
graphene. The interesting physics here includes the flat band structure,
the consequential non-perturbative strong correlation effects (e.g.
Wigner crystal and ferromagnetism), the frustration in orbital exchange,
and the orbital analogy of the quantum anomalous Hall effect.
To begin viewing slides, click on the first slide below. (Or, view as pdf.)