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American Physical Society, Physical Review Letters, 20(115)

DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.115.203001

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Emergent Devil’s Staircase without Particle-Hole Symmetry in Rydberg Quantum Gases with Competing Attractive and Repulsive Interactions

Journal article published in 2015 by Zhihao Lan, Jiří Minář, Emanuele Levi, Weibin Li, Igor Lesanovsky ORCID
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Abstract

The devil's staircase is a fractal structure that characterizes the ground state of one-dimensional classical lattice gases with long-range repulsive convex interactions. Its plateaus mark regions of stability for specific filling fractions which are controlled by a chemical potential. Typically, such a staircase has an explicit particle-hole symmetry; i.e., the staircase at more than half filling can be trivially extracted from the one at less than half filling by exchanging the roles of holes and particles. Here, we introduce a quantum spin chain with competing short-range attractive and long-range repulsive interactions, i.e., a nonconvex potential. In the classical limit the ground state features generalized Wigner crystals that-depending on the filling fraction-are composed of either dimer particles or dimer holes, which results in an emergent complete devil's staircase without explicit particle-hole symmetry of the underlying microscopic model. In our system the particle-hole symmetry is lifted due to the fact that the staircase is controlled through a two-body interaction rather than a one-body chemical potential. The introduction of quantum fluctuations through a transverse field melts the staircase and ultimately makes the system enter a paramagnetic phase. For intermediate transverse field strengths, however, we identify a region where the density-density correlations suggest the emergence of quasi-long-range order. We discuss how this physics can be explored with Rydberg-dressed atoms held in a lattice.