Orbital phases of p-band ultracold fermions in a frustrated triangular lattice

Orbital degrees of freedom play an important role in understanding the emergence of unconventional quantum phases. Ultracold atomic gases in optical lattices provide a wonderful platform to simulate orbital physics. In this work, we consider spinless fermionic atoms loaded into p-orbital bands of a two-dimensional frustrated triangular lattice. The system can be described by an extended Fermi-Hubbard model, which is numerically solved by using the orbital version of real-space dynamical mean-field theory. Due to the interplay of anisotropic hoppings and geometrical frustration, a rich phase diagram is found, including stripe-orbital, paraorbital, and ferro-orbital phases, in contrast to its bosonic analog with orbital-skyrmion ordering in the identical lattice. In order to understand the underlying mechanics of competing orbital orders, we derive an effective orbital- exchange model, which yields consistent explanation with our main numerical results.