The Lieb excitations and topological flat mode of spectral function of Tonks-Girardeau gas in Kronig-Penney potential

Abstract

Lieb excitations are fundamental to the understanding of the low energy behaviour of many-body quantum gases. Here we study the spectral function of a Tonks-Girardeau gas in a finite sized Kronig-Penney potential and show that the Lieb-I and Lieb-II excitations can become gapped as a function of the barrier height. Moreover, we reveal the existence of a topological flat mode near the Fermi energy and at zero momentum and show that this is robust to perturbations in the system. Through a scaling analysis, we determine the divergent behaviour of the spectral function. Our results provide a significant reference for the observation and understanding of the gapped Lieb excitations and the topological flat mode of quantum gases in experimentally realistic subwavelength optical lattice potentials.