High-temperature properties of fermionic alkaline-earth-metal atoms in optical lattices

We calculate experimentally relevant properties of trapped fermionic alkaline-earth-metal atoms in an optical lattice, modeled by the SU(N) Hubbard model. We employ a high-temperature expansion that is accurate when the temperature is 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 noninteracting gas, as a function of initial gas temperature. Of particular experimental interest, we find that increasing N for fixed particle numbers and initial temperatures gives substantially colder Mott insulators after the adiabatic ramping, up to more than a factor of 5 for relevant parameters. This cooling happens for all N, fixing the initial entropy, or for all N less than or similar to 20 (the exact value depends on dimensionality), at fixed, experimentally relevant initial temperatures.