Paper detail

Four-coloring model and frustrated superfluidity in the diamond lattice

We propose a novel four-coloring model which describes "frustrated superfluidity" of $p$-band bosons in the diamond optical lattice. The superfluid phases of the condensate wavefunctions on the diamond-lattice bonds are mapped to four distinct colors at low temperatures. The fact that a macroscopic number of states satisfy the constraints that four differently colored bonds meet at the same site leads to an extensive degeneracy in the superfluid ground state at the classical level. We demonstrate that the phase of the superfluid wavefunction as well as the orbital angular momentum correlations exhibit a power-law decay in the degenerate manifold that is described by an emergent magnetostatic theory with three independent flux fields. Our results thus provide a novel example of critical superfluid phase with algebraic order in three dimensions. We further show that quantum fluctuations favor a Néel ordering of orbital angular moments with broken sublattice symmetry through the order-by-disorder mechanism.