Observation of chiral currents with ultracold atoms in bosonic ladders

By M. Atala, M. Aidelsburger, M. Lohse, J. Barreiro, B. Paredes, I. Bloch. Nature Physics, 2014

394 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Engineering optical lattices with laser-induced tunnelling amplitudes has enabled the realization of artificial magnetic fields with remarkable tunability. Here, we report on the observation of chiral Meissner currents in bosonic ladders exposed to a strong artificial magnetic field. By suddenly decoupling the individual ladders and projecting into isolated double wells, we are able to measure the currents on each side of the ladder. For large coupling strengths along the rungs of the ladder, we find a saturated maximum chiral current, which is analogous to the surface currents in the Meissner effect. Below a critical inter-leg coupling strength, the chiral current decreases in good agreement with our expectations for a vortex lattice phase. Our realization of a low-dimensional Meissner-like effect and spin–orbit coupling in one dimension opens the path to exploring interacting particles in low dimensions exposed to a uniform magnetic field. Laser-assisted tunnelling allows quantum gases in optical lattices to be exposed to tunable artificial magnetic fields. Using such fields to confine a bosonic gas to an array of one-dimensional ladders, a low-dimensional equivalent of the Meissner effect has been observed.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/047e2b8f5acf7b6b339995da08777a96201532ad

Citations in the corpus

• Artificial gauge fields in materials and engineered systems (2017, neutral): “Instead, a linear potential gradient R = m results in homogeneous effective magnetic fields [66,65,171,172,69].”
• Topological bands for ultracold atoms (2018, neutral): “A method for detecting local currents was presented in experiments from the Munich group (Atala et al., 2014).”