Phase-separated Ferromagnetism in Spin-imbalanced Fermi Atoms Loaded on an Optical Ladder: a DMRG study

Abstract

We consider repulsively-interacting cold fermionic atoms loaded on an optical ladder lattice in a trapping potential. The density-matrix renormalization-group method is used to numerically calculate the ground state for systematically varied values of interaction U and spin imbalance p in the Hubbard model on the ladder. The system exhibits rich structures, where a fully spin polarized phase, spatially separated from other domains in the trapping potential, appears for large enough U and p. The phase-separated ferromagnetism can be captured as a real-space image of the energy gap between the ferromagnetic and other states arising from a combined effect of Nagaoka's ferromagnetism extended to the ladder and the density dependence of the energy separation between competing states. We also predict how to maximize the ferromagnetic region.