High temperature thermodynamics of fermionic alkaline earth atoms in optical lattices

Understand

We calculate experimentally relevant properties of trapped fermionic alkaline earth atoms in an optical lattice, modeled by the SU(N) Hubbard model.

• Our calculation is accurate when the temperature is much larger than the tunneling rate, similar to current regimes in ultracold atom experiments.
• In addition to exploring the Mott insulator-metal crossover, we calculate final temperatures achieved by the standard experimental protocol of adiabatically ramping from a non-interacting gas, as a function of initial gas temperature and final state lattice parameters.
• Of particular experimental interest, we find that increasing $N$ gives substantially \textit{colder} Mott insulators, up to more than a factor of five for relevant parameters.