Selective insulators and anomalous responses in correlated fermions with synthetic extra dimensions

Abstract

We study a three-component fermionic fluid in an optical lattice in a regime of intermediate-to- strong interactions allowing for Raman processes connecting the different components, similar to those used to create artificial gauge fields (AGF). Using Dynamical Mean-Field Theory we show that the combined effect of interactions and AGFs induces a variety of anomalous phases in which different components of the fermionic fluid display qualitative differences, i.e., the physics is flavor-selective. Remarkably, the different components can display huge differences in the correlation effects, measured by their effective masses and non-monotonic behavior of their occupation number as a function of the chemical potential, signaling a sort of selective instability of the overall stable quantum fluid.