Emerging Bosons with Three-Body Interactions from Spin-1 Atoms in Optical Lattices

Abstract

We study two many-body systems of bosons interacting via an infinite three-body contact repulsion in a lattice: a pairs quasi-condensate induced by correlated hopping and the discrete version of the Pfaffian wavefunction. We propose to experimentally realise systems characterized by such interaction by means of a proper spin-1 lattice Hamiltonian: spin degrees of freedom are locally mapped into occupation numbers of emerging bosons, in a fashion similar to spin-1/2 and hardcore bosons. Such a system can be realized with ultracold spin-1 atoms in a Mott Insulator with filling-factor one. The high versatility of these setups allows us to engineer spin-hopping operators breaking the SU(2) symmetry, as needed to approximate interesting bosonic Hamiltonians with three-body hardcore constraint. For this purpose we combine bichromatic spin-independent superlattices and Raman transitions to induce a different hopping rate for each spin orientation. Finally, we illustrate how our setup could be used to experimentally realize the first setup, i.e. the transition to a pairs quasi-condensed phase of the emerging bosons. We also report on a route towards the realization of a discrete bosonic Pfaffian wavefunction and list some open problems to reach this goal.