Effective three-body interactions via photon-assisted tunneling in an optical lattice

Daley, Andrew J. and Simon, Jonathan (2014) Effective three-body interactions via photon-assisted tunneling in an optical lattice. Physical Review A, 89 (5). 053619. ISSN 1050-2947 (https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.89.053619)

[thumbnail of Daley-Simon-PRA2014-photon-assisted-tunneling-in-an-optical-lattice] PDF. Filename: Daley_Simon_PRA2014_photon_assisted_tunneling_in_an_optical_lattice.pdf
Accepted Author Manuscript

Download (1MB)

Abstract

We present a simple, experimentally realizable method to make coherent three-body interactions dominate the physics of an ultracold lattice gas. Our scheme employs either lattice modulation or laser-induced tunneling to reduce or turn off two-body interactions in a rotating frame, promoting three-body interactions arising from multiorbital physics to leading-order processes. This approach provides a route to strongly correlated phases of lattice gases that are beyond the reach of previously proposed dissipative three-body interactions. In particular, we study the mean-field phase diagram for spinless bosons with three- and two- body interactions and provide a roadmap to dimer states of varying character in one dimension. This toolkit should be immediately applicable in state-of-the-art cold-atom experiments.