Nature Communications (Jun 2024)
Multipolar condensates and multipolar Josephson effects
Abstract
Abstract When single-particle dynamics are suppressed in certain strongly correlated systems, dipoles arise as elementary carriers of quantum kinetics. These dipoles can further condense, providing physicists with a rich realm to study fracton phases of matter. Whereas recent theoretical discoveries have shown that an unconventional lattice model may host a dipole condensate as the ground state, we show that dipole condensates prevail in bosonic systems due to a self-proximity effect. Our findings allow experimentalists to manipulate the phase of a dipole condensate and deliver dipolar Josephson effects, where supercurrents of dipoles arise in the absence of particle flows. The self-proximity effects can also be utilized to produce a generic multipolar condensate. The kinetics of the n-th order multipoles unavoidably creates a condensate of the (n + 1)-th order multipoles, forming a hierarchy of multipolar condensates that will offer physicists a whole new class of macroscopic quantum phenomena.