Contributor info: Dr Andreas Osterloh

Wayne Jordan Chetcuti, Andreas Osterloh, Luigi Amico, Juan Polo

SciPost Phys. 15, 181 (2023) · published 30 October 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

Interacting N-component fermions spatially confined in ring-shaped potentials display specific coherence properties. The orbital angular momentum per particle of such systems can be quantized to fractional values specifically depending on the particle-particle interaction. Here we demonstrate how to monitor the state of the system through homodyne (momentum distribution) and self-heterodyne system's expansion. For homodyne protocols, the momentum distribution is affected by the particle statistics in two distinctive ways. The first effect is a purely statistical one: at zero interactions, the characteristic hole in the momentum distribution around the momentum k=0 opens up once half of the SU(N) Fermi sphere is displaced. The second effect originates from the interaction: The fractionalization in the interacting system manifests itself by an additional "delay" in the flux for the occurrence of the hole, that now becomes a characteristic minimum at k=0. We demonstrate that the angular momentum fractional quantization is reflected in the self-heterodyne interference as specific dislocations in interferograms. Our analysis demonstrates how the study of the interference fringes grants us access to both number of particles and number of components of SU(N) fermions.

Andreas Osterloh, Juan Polo, Wayne J. Chetcuti, Luigi Amico

SciPost Phys. 15, 006 (2023) · published 11 July 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We consider a gas of repulsive $N$-component fermions confined in a ring-shaped potential, subjected to an effective magnetic field. For large repulsion strengths, we work out a Bethe ansatz scheme to compute the two-point correlation matrix and then the one-particle density matrix. Our results hold in the mesoscopic regime of finite but sufficiently large number of particles and system size that are not accessible by numerics. We access the momentum distribution of the system and analyse its specific dependence of interaction, magnetic field and number of components $N$. In the context of cold atoms, the exact computation of the correlation matrix to determine the interference patterns that are produced by releasing cold atoms from ring traps is carried out.