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Schrieffer-Wolff Transformations for Experiments: Dynamically Suppressing Virtual Doublon-Hole Excitations in a Fermi-Hubbard Simulator

In strongly interacting systems with a separation of energy scales, low-energy effective Hamiltonians help provide insights into the relevant physics at low temperatures. The emergent interactions in the effective model are mediated by virtual excitations of high-energy states: For example, virtual doublon-hole excitations in the Fermi-Hubbard model mediate antiferromagnetic spin-exchange interactions in the derived effective model, known as the $t-J-3s$ model. Formally this procedure is described by performing a unitary Schrieffer-Wolff basis transformation. In the context of quantum simulation, it can be advantageous to consider the effective model to interpret experimental results. However, virtual excitations such as doublon-hole pairs can obfuscate the measurement of physical observables. Here we show that quantum simulators allow one to access the effective model even more directly by performing measurements in a rotated basis. We propose a protocol to perform a Schrieffer-Wolff transformation on Fermi-Hubbard low-energy eigenstates (or thermal states) to dynamically prepare approximate $t-J-3s$ model states using fermionic atoms in an optical lattice. Our protocol involves performing a linear ramp of the optical lattice depth, which is slow enough to eliminate the virtual doublon-hole fluctuations but fast enough to freeze out the dynamics in the effective model. We perform a numerical study using exact diagonalization and find an optimal ramp speed for which the state after the lattice ramp has maximal overlap with the $t-J-3s$ model state. We compare our numerics to experimental data from our Lithium-6 fermionic quantum gas microscope and show a proof-of-principle demonstration of this protocol. More generally, this protocol can be beneficial to studies of effective models by enabling the suppression of virtual excitations in a wide range of quantum simulation experiments.