Engineering of a Low-Entropy Quantum Simulator for Strongly Correlated Electrons Using SU($\mathcal{N}$)-Symmetric Cold Atom Mixtures

Abstract: An advanced cooling scheme, incorporating entropy engineering, is vital for isolated artificial quantum systems designed to emulate the low-temperature physics of strongly correlated electron systems (SCESs). This study theoretically demonstrates a cooling method employing multi-component Fermi gases with SU($\mathcal{N}$)-symmetric interactions, focusing on the case of $^{173}$Yb atoms in a two-dimensional optical lattice. Adiabatically introducing a nonuniform state-selective laser gives rise to two distinct subsystems: a central low-temperature region, exclusively composed of two specific spin components, acts as a quantum simulator for SCESs, while the surrounding $\mathcal{N}$-component mixture retains a significant portion of the entropy of the system. The SU($\mathcal{N}$)-symmetric interactions ensure that the total particle numbers for each component become good quantum numbers, creating a sharp boundary for the two-component region. The cooling efficiency is assessed through extensive finite-temperature Lanczos calculations. The results lay the foundation for quantum simulations of two-dimensional systems of Hubbard or Heisenberg type, offering crucial insights into intriguing low-temperature phenomena in condensed-matter physics.