Nanoscale-structured interactions and potential barriers for dipolar quantum gases

Citation:

Andreas Kruckenhauser, Lukas M. Sieberer, William G. Tobias, Kyle Matsuda, Luigi De Marco, Jun-Ru Li, Giacomo Valtolina, Ana Maria Rey, Jun Ye, Mikhail A. Baranov, and Peter Zoller. 2020. “Nanoscale-structured interactions and potential barriers for dipolar quantum gases.” arXiv:2001.11792.

Abstract:

We design dipolar quantum many-body Hamiltonians that will facilitate the realization of exotic quantum phases under the current experimental conditions achieved for polar molecules and magnetic atoms with large dipolar moments. The main idea is to modulate both two-body dipolar interactions and single-body potential barriers on a spatial scale of tens of nanometers to strongly enhance energy scales of engineered many-body systems. This new scheme greatly relaxes the requirement for low temperatures necessary for observing new quantum phases, especially in comparison to Hubbard Hamiltonians for regular optical lattices. For polar molecules, our approach builds on the use of microwave fields to couple rotational energy eigenstates in static electric fields with strong gradients. We illustrate this approach by demonstrating the orientation switching on the nanoscale for the induced electric dipole moment of a polar molecule. This configuration leads to the formation of interface bound states of fermionic molecules with binding energies far exceeding typical energy scales in current experiments. While the concepts are developed for polar molecules, many of the present ideas can be readily carried over to atoms with magnetic dipolar interactions.