Finding the Elusive Sliding Phase in the Superfluid-Normal Phase Transition Smeared by c-Axis Disorder

We consider a stack of weakly Josephson coupled superfluid layers with c-axis disorder in the form of random superfluid stiffnesses and vortex fugacities in each layer as well as random interlayer coupling strengths. In the absence of disorder this system has a 3D XY type superfluid-normal phase transition as a function of temperature. We develop a functional renormalization group to treat the effects of disorder, and demonstrate that the disorder results in the smearing of the superfluid-normal phase transition via the formation of a Griffiths phase. Remarkably, in the Griffiths phase, the emergent power-law distribution of the interlayer couplings gives rise to a sliding Griffiths superfluid, with a finite stiffness in the a-b direction along the layers, and a vanishing stiffness perpendicular to it

Landau Levels in Strained Optical Lattices

We propose a hexagonal optical lattice system with spatial variations in the hopping matrix elements. Just like in the valley Hall effect in strained Graphene, for atoms near the Dirac points the variations in the hopping matrix elements can be described by a pseudo-magnetic field and result in the formation of Landau levels. We show that the pseudo-magnetic field leads to measurable experimental signatures in momentum resolved Bragg spectroscopy, Bloch oscillations, cyclotron motion, and quantization of in-situ densities. Our proposal can be realized by a slight modification of existing experiments. In contrast to previous methods, pseudo-magnetic fields are realized in a completely static system avoiding common heating effects and therefore opening the door to studying interaction effects in Landau levels with cold atoms.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure