Repulsively-bound pair states in the 1D extended Hubbard model

The binding between two particles is usually mediated by attractive forces. However, operating in an external confinement, one can observe pair-binding even in presence of repulsive interactions. The existence of such bound states has been conjectured for the one-dimensional extended Hubbard model, but, up to now, their observation remained elusive.

In this talk, we present our recent findings on realizing one-dimensional extended Hubbard systems for atoms trapped in optical lattices and explore the emerging bound states. We engineer the long-range repulsion between two adjacent lattices sites using stroboscopic Rydberg dressing. We probe the presence of the bound state by monitoring the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of two particles using our quantum gas microscope, giving us direct access to the evolution of the density and the underlying correlations. As a final measurement, we explore multiparticle binding between three atoms. Our results pave the way to study complex extended Hubbard models and string breaking in spin chains.