Yang-Mills gauge theories from simple fermionic lattice models

A doublet of three-dimensional Dirac fermions can effectively describe the low energy spectrum of a fermionic cubic lattice. We employ this fermion doubling to encode a non-Abelian SU(2) charge in the fundamental representation. We explicitly demonstrate that suitable distortion of the tunnelling couplings can introduce a scalar and a Yang-Mills field in the effective low energy description, both coupled to the Dirac fermions. The simplicity of the model suggests its physical implementation with ultra-cold atoms or molecules.