Ising phase transitions and thermodynamics of correlated fermions in a two-dimensional spin-dependent lattice potential

Abstract

We present a {\it numerically exact} study of the Hubbard model with spin-dependent anisotropic hopping on the square lattice using auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo method. At half filling, the system undergoes Ising phase transitions upon cooling, leading to the formation of Ising-type antiferromagnetic order for repulsive interactions and charge-density wave order for attractive interactions at finite temperatures. By elegantly implementing the sign-problem-free condition and Hubbard-Stratonovich transformations, we achieve significant improvements in precision control of the numerical calculations and obtain highly accurate results of the transition temperatures from weak to strong interactions across representative anisotropies. We further characterize the system by examining the temperature dependence of various thermodynamic properties, including the energy, double occupancy, specific heat and charge susceptibility. Specifically, we provide unbiased numerical results of the entropy map on temperature-interaction plane, the critical entropy, and the spin, singlon and doublon correlations, all of which are directly measurable in optical lattice experiments. Away from half filling, we explore the behavior of the sign problem and investigate the possible emergence of stripe spin-density wave order in the system with repulsive interaction.