Nontrivial Haldane phase of an atomic two-component Fermi gas trapped in a 1D optical lattice

Phys Rev Lett. 2012 Dec 7;109(23):235302. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.235302. Epub 2012 Dec 5.

Abstract

We propose a method to create a nontrivial Haldane phase in an atomic two-component Fermi gas loaded on a one-dimensional optical lattice with trap potential. The Haldane phase is naturally formed on a p-band Mott core in a wide range of the strong on-site repulsive interaction. The present proposal is composed of two steps, one of which is theoretical derivation of an effective 1D S=1 interacting-chain model from the original tight-binding Hamiltonian handling the two p orbitals, and the other of which is a numerical demonstration employing the density-matrix renormalization group for the formation of the Haldane phase on a p-band Mott core and its associated features in the original tight-binding model with the harmonic trap potential.