Search for: All records

The interplay of magnetic excitations and itinerant charge carriers is a ubiquitous phenomenon in strongly correlated electron systems. A key theoretical question is understanding the renormalization of the magnon quasiparticle, a collective spin excitation, upon doping a magnetic insulator. Here we observe a new type of quasiparticle—a magnon-Fermi-polaron—arising from the dressing of a magnon with the doped holes of a cold-atom Fermi–Hubbard system. Using Raman excitation with controlled momentum in a doped, spin-polarized band insulator, we address the spectroscopic properties of the magnon-polaron. In an undoped system with strong interactions, photoexcitation produces magnons, whose properties are accurately described by spin-wave theory. We measure the evolution of the photoexcitation spectra as we move away from this limit to produce magnon-polarons due to dressing of the magnons by charge excitations. We observe a shift in the polaron energy with doping that is strongly dependent on the injected momentum, accompanied by a reduction of spectral weight in the probed energy window. We anticipate that the technique introduced here, which is the analogue of inelastic neutron scattering, will provide atomic quantum simulators with access to the dynamics of a wide variety of excitations in strongly correlated phases. 

Abstract Emergent strongly correlated electronic phenomena in atomically thin transition-metal dichalcogenides are an exciting frontier in condensed matter physics, with examples ranging from bilayer superconductivity and electronic Wigner crystals to the ongoing search for exciton condensation. Here we take a step towards the latter by reporting experimental signatures of unconventional hybridization of the excitons with opposing dipoles consistent with coherence between interlayer electrons in a transition-metal dichalcogenide bilayer. We investigate naturally grown MoS₂homobilayers integrated in a dual-gate device structure allowing independent control of the electron density and out-of-plane electric field. By electron doping the bilayer when electron tunnelling between the layers is negligible, we observe that the two interlayer excitons hybridize, displaying unusual behaviour distinct from both conventional level crossing and anti-crossing. We show that these observations can be explained by quasi-static random coupling between the excitons, which increases with electron density and decreases with temperature. We argue that this phenomenon is indicative of a spatially fluctuating order parameter in the form of interlayer electron coherence, a theoretically predicted many-body state that has yet to be unambiguously established experimentally outside of the quantum Hall regime. 

The Boltzmann equation is a powerful theoretical tool for modeling the collective dynamics of quantum many-body systems subject to external perturbations. Analysis of the equation gives access to linear response properties including collective modes and transport coefficients, but often proves intractable due to computational costs associated with multidimensional integrals describing collision processes. Here, we present a method to resolve this bottleneck, enabling the study of a broad class of many-body systems that appear in fundamental science contexts and technological applications. Specifically, we demonstrate that a Gaussian mixture model can accurately represent equilibrium distribution functions, thereby allowing efficient evaluation of collision integrals. Inspired by cold atom experiments, we apply this method to investigate the collective behavior of a quantum Bose-Fermi mixture of cold atoms in a cigar-shaped trap, a system that is particularly challenging to analyze. We focus on monopole and quadrupole collective modes above the Bose-Einstein transition temperature, and find a rich phenomenology that spans interference effects between bosonic and fermionic collective modes, dampening of these modes, and the emergence of hydrodynamics in various parameter regimes. These effects are readily verifiable experimentally. Published by the American Physical Society2024 

Quantum interference can deeply alter the nature of many-body phases of matter1. In the case of the Hubbard model, Nagaoka proved that introducing a single itinerant charge can transform a paramagnetic insulator into a ferromagnet through path interference2–4. However, a microscopic observation of this kinetic magnetism induced by individually imaged dopants has been so far elusive. Here we demonstrate the emergence of Nagaoka polarons in a Hubbard system realized with strongly interacting fermions in a triangular optical lattice5,6. Using quantum gas microscopy, we image these polarons as extended ferromagnetic bubbles around particle dopants arising from the local interplay of coherent dopant motion and spin exchange. By contrast, kinetic frustration due to the triangular geometry promotes antiferromagnetic polarons around hole dopants7. Our work augurs the exploration of exotic quantum phases driven by charge motion in strongly correlated systems and over sizes that are challenging for numerical simulation8–10.