Raman-assisted hopping may be used to realize the anyon Hubbard model in
one-dimensional optical lattices. We propose a feasible scenario that
significantly improves the proposal of [T. Keilmann et al., Nature Commun. 2,
361 (2011)], allowing as well for an exact realization of the two-body
hard-core constraint, and for controllable effective interactions without the
need of Feshbach resonances. We show that the combination of anyonic statistics
and two-body hard-core constraint leads to a rich ground state physics,
including Mott insulators with attractive interactions, pair superfluids, dimer
phases, and multicritical points. Moreover, the anyonic statistics results in a
novel two-component superfluid of holon and doublon dimers, characterized by a
large but finite compressibility and a multipeaked momentum distribution, which
may be easily revealed experimentally.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure
