Relation between the noise correlations and the spin structure factor for Mott-insulating states in SU(N) Hubbard models

Abstract

It is well established that the noise correlations measured by time-of-flight imaging in cold-atom experiments, which correspond to the density-density correlations in the momentum space of trapped atomic gases, can probe the spin structure factor deep in the Mott-insulating regime of SU(2) Hubbard models. We explicitly derive the mathematical relation between the noise correlations and the spin structure factor in the strong-interaction limit of SU$(N)$ Hubbard models at any integer filling $\rho$. By calculating the ground states of one-dimensional SU$(N)$ Fermi-Hubbard models for $2\leq N\leq 6$ with use of the density-matrix renormalization-group method, we confirm the relation numerically in the regime of strong interactions $U \gg t$, where $U$ and $t$ denote the onsite interaction and the hopping energy. We show that the deviation between the actual noise correlations and those obtained from the spin structure factor scales as approximately $(t/U)^2$ for $\rho=1$ at intermediate and large lattice sizes on the basis of numeric and semi-analytic arguments.