Pairing and topological phases in cold atoms with long range interactions

Pairing and topological phases in cold atoms with long range interactions Chapter 1 Introduction The systematic study and classification of phase transitions has become a popular research area in physics over the past decades. The most familiar phenomena associated to the concept of phase transition are the ones giving rise to macroscopic changes in the properties of strongly correlated many-body systems due to thermal fluctuations. The most prominent examples of this kind of behaviour are the ferromagnetic-paramagnetic transition in lattice spin models and the liquid-gas transition. On the other hand, when dealing with quantum-mechanical systems changes of matter from one state to another can arise as the result of the variation of parameters other than temperature. In particular, when a given many-body quantum problem is studied at zero temperature, thereby suppressing thermal fluctuations, it is the interplay between kinetic energy and interactions that can cause the system to jump into different phases as the model parameters are varied. Phase transitions occurring at zero temperature are widely known as quantum phase transitions. In the framework of the physics of phase transitions, the role of dimensionality is a noticeable one. The major challenge in this perspective is the treatment of low dimensional systems, where standard mean-field treatments and ordinary perturbation theory are known to fail due to the enhancement of fluctuations. The goal of describing collective behaviours in reduced dimensionality is usually pursued in one-dimensional (1D) systems, which turn out to be simple enough to be studied in an effective way through both numerical and analytical techniques, while exhibiting a rich and deeply fascinating phenomenology. As a matter of fact, since particles confined to one dimension cannot avoid interactions with each other, the typical low energy excitations of the system are represented by collective density waves, which substitute nearly free quasiparticle excitations characterizing the behaviour of three-dimensional Fermi liquids in the description of the effects of the interplay between kinetic fluctuations and interactions. On the other hand, the tools employed in the activity of tackling 1D manybody problems are efficient and well developed. The analytical techniques aremainly based on the bosonization technique, which allows for the reformulation of strongly correlated 1D systems onto free bosonic theories, which can then be analyzed by means of standard path integral techniques. Meanwhile, the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) algorithm represents the state-of-theart numerical machinery in the study of 1D physics, since it allows to efficiently extract the low energy properties of the model Hamiltonian and consequently characterize the corresponding phase diagram by means of the behaviour of properly chosen order parameters. As a final remark pointing out the relevance of the research effort in the direction of a better understanding of 1D many-body quantum systems, it is worth noticing that 1D systems do not represent only a playground for theorists, but have been experimentally realized by means of setups with cold atoms trapped in optical lattices, where the experimentalist is able to tune the model parameters by varying the characteristic features of the trapping laser beams and meanwhile has a comfortable access to the most relevant observables.