Charge Pumping of Interacting Fermion Atoms in the Synthetic Dimension

Abstract

Recently it has been theoretically proposed and experimentally demonstrated that a spin-orbit coupled multicomponent gas in a 1D lattice can be viewed as a spinless gas in a synthetic 2D lattice with a magnetic flux. In this Letter we consider interaction effects in such a Fermi gas, and propose these effects can be easily detected in a charge pumping experiment. Using 1/3 filling of the lowest 2D band as an example, in the strongly interacting regime, we show that the charge pumping value gradually approaches a universal fractional value for large spin components and low filling of the 1D lattice, indicating a fractional quantum Hall-type behavior, while the charge pumping value is zero if the 1D lattice filling is commensurate, indicating a Mott insulator behavior. The charge-density-wave order is also discussed.