Fully Frustrated Cold Atoms

Abstract

Fully frustrated Josephson Junction arrays (FF-JJA's) exhibit a subtle compound phase transition in which an Ising transition associated with discrete broken translational symmetry and a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transition associated with quasi-long-range phase coherence occur nearly simultaneously. In this Letter we discuss a cold atom realization of the FF-JJA system. We demonstrate that both orders can be studied by standard momentum-distribution-function measurements and present numerical results, based on a successful self-consistent spin-wave approximation, that illustrate the expected behavior of observables.