Observation of Chiral-Mode Domains in a Frustrated XY Model on Optical Triangular Lattices

Abstract

We investigated the relaxation and excitation in a frustrated XY model realized by a Bose gas in Floquet-engineered optical triangular lattices. Periodically driving the position of the entire lattice structure enables the sign inversion of tunneling amplitudes, which, in the case of a triangular lattice, results in geometrical frustration of the local phase of wave packets. We revealed that the two spiral phases with chiral modes show significant differences in relaxation time from the initial ferromagnetic phase. While spontaneous symmetry breaking is clearly observed at a slow ramp of the Floquet drive, simultaneous occupation of two ground states often occurs at a fast ramp, which can be attributed to the domain formation of the chiral modes. The interference of the spatially separated chiral modes was observed, using a quantum gas microscope. This work leads to exploring the domain formation mechanism in a system with U(1)$\times \mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry.