Phase diagram of frustrated mixed-spin ladders in the strong-coupling limit

We study the ground-state properties of frustrated Heisenberg ferrimagnetic ladders with antiferromagnetic exchange interactions and two types of alternating sublattice spins. In the limit of strong rung couplings, we show that the mixed spin-1/2 and spin-1 ladders can be systematically mapped onto a spin-1/2 Heisenberg model with additional next-nearest-neighbor exchanges. The system is either in a ferrimagnetic state or in a critical spin-liquid state depending on the competition between the spin exchanges along the legs and the diagonal exchanges.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figur

Preparation of stable excited states in an optical lattice via sudden quantum quench

We study how stable excited many-body states of the Bose-Hubbard model, including both the gas-like state for strongly attractive bosons and bound cluster state for repulsive bosons, can be produced with cold bosonic atoms in an one-dimensional optical lattice. Starting from the initial ground states of strongly interacting bosonic systems, we can achieve stable excited states of the systems with opposite interaction strength by suddenly switching the interaction to the opposite limit. By exactly solving dynamics of the Bose-Hubbard model, we demonstrate that the produced excited state can be a very stable dynamic state. This allows the experimental study of excited state properties of ultracold atoms system in optical lattices.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Effect of incommensurate disorder on the resonant tunneling through Majorana bound states on the topological superconductor chains

We study the transport through the Kitaev's chain with incommensurate potentials coupled to two normal leads by the numerical operator method. We find a quantized linear conductance of $e^2/h$, which is independent to the disorder strength and the gate voltage in a wide range, signaling the Majorana bound states. While the incommensurate disorder suppresses the current at finite voltage bias, and then narrows the linear response regime of the $I-V$ curve which exhibits two plateaus corresponding to the superconducting gap and the band edge respectively. The linear conductance abruptly drops to zero as the disorder strength reaches the critical value $2+2\Delta$ with $\Delta$ the p-wave pairing amplitude, corresponding to the transition from the topological superconducting phase to the Anderson localized phase. Changing the gate voltage will also cause an abrupt drop of the linear conductance by driving the chain into the topologically trivial superconducting phase, whose $I-V$ curve exhibits an exponential shape.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

Many-body ground state localization and coexistence of localized and extended states in an interacting quasiperiodic system

We study the localization problem of one-dimensional interacting spinless fermions in an incommensurate optical lattice, which changes from an extended phase to a nonergoic many-body localized phase by increasing the strength of the incommensurate potential. We identify that there exists an intermediate regime before the system enters the many-body localized phase, in which both the localized and extended many-body states coexist, thus the system is divided into three different phases, which can be characterized by normalized participation ratios of the many-body eigenstates and distributions of natural orbitals of the corresponding one-particle density matrix. This is very different from its noninterating limit, in which all eigenstaes undergo a delocaliztion-localization transtion when the strength of the incommensurate potential exceeds a critical value.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figure

Quantum criticality in disordered bosonic optical lattices

Using the exact Bose-Fermi mapping, we study universal properties of ground-state density distributions and finite-temperature quantum critical behavior of one-dimensional hard-core bosons in trapped incommensurate optical lattices. Through the analysis of universal scaling relations in the quantum critical regime, we demonstrate that the superfluid to Bose glass transition and the general phase diagram of disordered hard-core bosons can be uniquely determined from finite-temperature density distributions of the trapped disordered system.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Quantum dynamics of repulsively bound atom pairs in the Bose-Hubbard model

We investigate the quantum dynamics of repulsively bound atom pairs in an optical lattice described by the periodic Bose-Hubbard model both analytically and numerically. In the strongly repulsive limit, we analytically study the dynamical problem by the perturbation method with the hopping terms treated as a perturbation. For a finite-size system, we numerically solve the dynamic problem in the whole regime of interaction by the exact diagonalization method. Our results show that the initially prepared atom pairs are dynamically stable and the dissociation of atom pairs is greatly suppressed when the strength of the on-site interaction is much greater than the tunneling amplitude, i.e., the strongly repulsive interaction induces a self-localization phenomenon of the atom pairs.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, significant changes mad