Competing magnetic orders in a bilayer Hubbard model with ultracold atoms

Abstract: Fermionic atoms in optical lattices have served as a compelling model system to study and emulate the physics of strongly-correlated matter. Driven by the advances of high-resolution microscopy, the recent focus of research has been on two-dimensional systems in which several quantum phases, such as anti-ferromagnetic Mott insulators for repulsive interactions and charge-density waves for attractive interactions have been observed. However, the aspired emulations of real materials, such as bilayer graphene, have to take into account that their lattice structure composes of coupled layers and therefore is not strictly two-dimensional. In this work, we realize a bilayer Fermi-Hubbard model using ultracold atoms in an optical lattice and demonstrate that the interlayer coupling controls a crossover between a planar anti-ferromagnetically ordered Mott insulator and a band insulator of spin-singlets along the bonds between the layers. Our work will enable the exploration of further fascinating properties of coupled-layer Hubbard models, such as theoretically predicted superconducting pairing mechanisms.