Selective insulators and anomalous responses in three-component fermionic gases with broken SU(3) symmetry

We study a three-component fermionic fluid in an optical lattice in a regime of intermediate to strong interactions allowing for optical processes connecting the different components, similar to those used to create artificial gauge fields. Using dynamical mean-field theory, we show that the combined effect of interactions and the external field induces a variety of anomalous phases in which different components of the fermionic fluid display qualitative differences, i.e., the physics is flavor selective. Remarkably, the different components can display huge differences in the correlation effects, measured by their effective masses and nonmonotonic behavior of their occupation number as a function of the chemical potential, signaling a sort of selective instability of the overall stable quantum fluid.