Birefringent breakup of Dirac fermions on a square optical lattice

Abstract

We introduce a lattice model for fermions in a spatially periodic magnetic field that also has spatially periodic hopping amplitudes. We discuss how this model might be realized with cold atoms in an artificial magnetic field on a square optical lattice. When there is an average flux of half a flux quantum per plaquette, the spectrum of low-energy excitations can be described by massless Dirac fermions in which the usually doubly degenerate Dirac cones split into cones with different ``speeds of light.'' These gapless birefringent Dirac fermions arise because of broken chiral symmetry in the kinetic energy term of the effective low-energy Hamiltonian. We characterize the effects of various perturbations to the low-energy spectrum, including staggered potentials, interactions, and domain-wall topological defects.