Realization of the Hofstadter Hamiltonian with ultracold atoms in optical lattices.

By M. Aidelsburger, M. Atala, M. Lohse, J. Barreiro, B. Paredes, I. Bloch. Physical Review Letters, 2013

1,034 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We demonstrate the experimental implementation of an optical lattice that allows for the generation of large homogeneous and tunable artificial magnetic fields with ultracold atoms. Using laser-assisted tunneling in a tilted optical potential, we engineer spatially dependent complex tunneling amplitudes. Thereby, atoms hopping in the lattice accumulate a phase shift equivalent to the Aharonov-Bohm phase of charged particles in a magnetic field. We determine the local distribution of fluxes through the observation of cyclotron orbits of the atoms on lattice plaquettes, showing that the system is described by the Hofstadter model. Furthermore, we show that for two atomic spin states with opposite magnetic moments, our system naturally realizes the time-reversal-symmetric Hamiltonian underlying the quantum spin Hall effect; i.e., two different spin components experience opposite directions of the magnetic field.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0d8e052a43ec2b185cdd72ed4d2741bca2f86b5d

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Citations in the corpus

Topological Thouless pumping of ultracold fermions (2015, methodology): “[12] Aidelsburger, M.”
Symmetry and Topology in Non-Hermitian Physics (2018, background): “[195] M.”
Quantum matter built from nanoscopic lattices of atoms and photons (2018, background): “…schemes already developed in cold atoms and trapped ions (Jaksch and Zoller, 2003; Bermudez, Schaetz, and Porras, 2011; Kolovsky, 2011; Aidelsburger et al., 2013; Miyake et al., 2013), here the interaction coefficients Jjl can also acquire a complex phase Jjl ¼ jJjljeiϕjl by properly…”
Optomechanical creation of magnetic fields for photons on a lattice (2015, background): “These developments in photonics are related to a growing effort across various fields to produce synthetic gauge fields for neutral particles [27–30].”
Measuring the Chern number of Hofstadter bands with ultracold bosonic atoms (2014, methodology): “Although earlier experiments used local cyclotron orbits to detect the artificial gauge field structure on the level of single plaquettes [12, 13], ar X iv :1 40 7.”
Topological photonics (2018, methodology): “The idea was first introduced by Jaksch and Zoller (2003) and experimentally implemented by Aidelsburger et al. (2013) and Miyake et al. (2013) for ultracold gases.”
Observation of chiral currents with ultracold atoms in bosonic ladders (2014, methodology): “Using the same scheme as in our previous works [13, 14], we employ a pair of far-detuned running-wave beams to induce left-right tunneling inside each double well.”