Condensed Matter Theory Seminar - W. Vincent Liu (Univ. of Pittsburgh) "Dirac bosons and topological edge excitations of an interacting Bose gas in an orbital optical lattice"

When interacting ultracold atoms are loaded into the metastable but long lived higher orbital excited bands of an optical lattice, would it be possible for the atoms to exhibit  conceptually novel phases that have no prior analogue from the well-known past condensed matter models?  In this talk, I will report some of our recent findings when exploiting symmetries, quantum phases, and topology beyond natural conditions in such artificial quantum orbital systems.