This series consists of talks in the area of Quantum Matter.
Recently, a new family of correlated honeycomb materials with strong spin-orbit coupling have been promising candidates to realize the Kitaev spin liquid.
Kitaev materials — spin-orbit assisted Mott insulators, in which local, spin-orbit entangled j=1/2 moments form that are subject to strong bond-directional interactions — have attracted broad interest for their potential to realize spin liquids. Experimentally, a number of 4d and 5d systems have been widely studied including the honeycomb materials Na2IrO3, α-Li2IrO3, and RuCl3 as candidate spin liquid compounds — however, all of these materials magnetically order at sufficiently low temperatures.
We study the eigenstate properties of a nonintegrable spin chain that was recently realized experimentally in a Rydberg-atom quantum simulator. In the experiment, long-lived coherent many-body oscillations were observed only when the system was initialized in a particular product state. This pronounced coherence has been attributed to the presence of special "scarred" eigenstates with nearly equally-spaced energies and putative nonergodic properties despite their finite energy density.
We study the possibility of a deconfined quantum phase transition in a realistic model of a two dimensional Shastry-Sutherland quantum magnet, using both numerical and field theoretic techniques. We argue that the quantum phase transition between a two fold degenerate plaquette valence bond solid (pVBS) order and N\'eel ordered phase may be described by a deconfined quantum critical point (DQCP) with emergent O(4) symmetry.
The construction of soluble lattice toy models is an important theoretical approach in the study of strongly interacting topological phases of matter. On the other hand, the primary experimental probe to such systems is via electromagnetic response. Somewhat unsatisfactorily, the current systematic construction of the lattice toy models focuses on braiding statistics and does not admit coupling to an electromagnetic background. Thus there is a mismatch between our theoretical approach and experimental probe.
Experiments with ultracold fermionic gases are thriving and continue to provide us with valuable insights into fundamental aspects of physics. A special system of interest is the so-called unitary Fermi gas (UFG) situated right in the "middle" of the crossover between Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer superfluidity and Bose-Einstein condensation. However, the theoretical treatment of these gases is highly challenging due to the absence of a small expansion parameter as well as the appearance of the infamous sign problem in the presence of, e.g., finite spin polarizations.
In crystals, quantum electrons can be spatially distributed in a way that the bulk solid supports macroscopic electric multipole moments, which are deeply
related with emergence of topology insulators in condensed matter systems. However, unlike the classical electric multipoles in open space,
defining electric multipoles in crystals is a non-trivial task. So far, only the dipolar moment, namely polarization, has been successfully defined and served as a classic example of topological insulators.
This year there appear several amazing experiments in the graphene moire superlattices. In this talk I will focus on the ABC trilayer graphene/h-BN system. Mott-like insulators at 1/4 and 1/2 of the valence band have already been reported by Feng Wang’s group at Berkeley. The sample is dual gated on top and bottom with voltage V_t and V_b. V_t+V_b controls the density of electrons. Interestingly we find that the displacement field D=V_t-V_b can control both the topology and the bandwidth of the valence band.