Hubbard model for ultracold bosonic atoms interacting via zero-point-energy-induced three-body interactions

摘要

We show that, for ultracold neutral bosonic atoms held in a three-dimensional periodic potential or optical lattice, a Hubbard model with dominant, attractive three-body interactions can be generated. In fact, we derive that the effect of pairwise interactions can be made small or zero starting from the realization that collisions occur at the zero-point energy of an optical lattice site and the strength of the interactions is energy dependent from effective-range contributions. We determine the strength of the two- and three-body interactions for scattering from van der Waals potentials and near Fano-Feshbach resonances. For van der Waals potentials, which for example describe scattering of alkaline-earth atoms, we find that the pairwise interaction can only be turned off for species with a small negative scattering length, leaving the Sr-88 isotope a possible candidate. Interestingly, for collisional magnetic Feshbach resonances this restriction does not apply and there often exist magnetic fields where the two-body interaction is small. We illustrate this result for several known narrow resonances between alkali-metal atoms as well as chromium atoms. Finally, we compare the size of the three-body interaction with hopping rates and describe limits due to three-body recombination.