Quantum gas microscopy of three-flavor Hubbard systems

Abstract

Hubbard systems are paradigmatic realizations of strongly correlated many-body systems. Introducing additional species breaks the SU(2) symmetry of the Hubbard model and leads to a wide variety of novel exotic quantum phases. Three-component fermionic systems are at the heart of model systems for quantum chromodynamics where the three components reflect the three flavors. Here, we extend quantum gas microscopy to three-flavor Fermi lattice gases in the Hubbard regime. Relying on site- and flavor-resolved detection, we study the phase diagram of the three-flavor Hubbard model and find signatures of flavor-selective localization and selective pairing at temperatures down to the tunneling energy scale. Our measurements are compared with numerical linked-cluster expansion calculations. Further increase of phase space density may enable the observation of a novel pair Mott phase at half filling, and shows a path towards the study of color superfluidity and other aspects of quantum chromodynamics.