Resonant Spin-Changing Collisions in Spinor Fermi Gases

The compensation of quadratic Zeeman effect and trap energy in high-spin fermions is shown to lead to resonances in the spin-changing collisions that are typically absent in spinor condensates and spin-1/2 fermions. We study these resonances in lattice fermions, showing that they permit the targeting of a particular spin-changing channel while suppressing the rest and the creation of magnetically insensitive superpositions of many-body states with entangled spin and trap degrees of freedom. Finally, the intersite tunneling may lead to a quantum phase transition described by a quantum Ising model