Nontrivial Haldane Phase of an Atomic Two-Component Fermi Gas Trapped in a 1D Optical Lattice

Abstract

We propose a method to create a nontrivial Haldane phase in an atomic two-component Fermi gas loaded on a one-dimensional optical lattice with trap potential. The Haldane phase is naturally formed on a p-band Mott core in a wide range of the strong on-site repulsive interaction. The present proposal is composed of two steps, one of which is theoretical derivation of an effective 1D S=1 interacting-chain model from the original tight-binding Hamiltonian handling the two p orbitals, and the other of which is a numerical demonstration employing the density-matrix renormalization group for the formation of the Haldane phase on a p-band Mott core and its associated features in the original tight-binding model with the harmonic trap potential.