Unconventional phases of attractive Fermi gases in synthetic Hall ribbons

2017

An innovative way to produce quantum Hall ribbons in a cold atomic system is to use M hyperfine states of atoms in a one-dimensional optical lattice to mimic an additional "synthetic dimension." A notable aspect here is that the SU(M) symmetric interaction between atoms manifests as "infinite ranged" along the synthetic dimension. We study the many-body physics of fermions with SU(M) symmetric attractive interactions in this system using a combination of analytical field theoretic and numerical density-matrix renormalization-group methods. We uncover the rich ground-state phase diagram of the system, including unconventional phases such as squished baryon fluids, shedding light on many-body…