Seeing Hofstadter's butterfly in atomic Fermi gases

Abstract

We propose a novel way to detect the fractal energy spectrum of the Hofstadter model from the density distributions of ultracold fermions in an external trap. At low temperature, the local compressibility is proportional to the density of states of the system which reveals the fractal energy spectrum. However, thermal broadening and noises in the real experimental situation inevitably smear out fine features in the density distribution. To overcome this difficulty, we use the maximum entropy method to extract the density of states directly from the noisy thermal density distributions. Simulations show that one is able to restore the core feature of the Hofstadter's butterfly spectrum with current experimental techniques. By further reducing the noise or the temperature, one can refine the resolution and observe fine structures of the butterfly spectrum.