Synthetic magnetic fields for ultracold neutral atoms

By Yu-Ju Lin, R. Compton, K. J. Garcia, J. V. Porto, Ian B. Spielman. Nature, 2009

939 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Neutral atomic Bose condensates and degenerate Fermi gases have been used to realize important many-body phenomena in their most simple and essential forms, without many of the complexities usually associated with material systems. However, the charge neutrality of these systems presents an apparent limitation—a wide range of intriguing phenomena arise from the Lorentz force for charged particles in a magnetic field, such as the fractional quantum Hall effect in two-dimensional electron systems. The limitation can be circumvented by exploiting the equivalence of the Lorentz force and the Coriolis force to create synthetic magnetic fields in rotating neutral systems. This was demonstrated by the appearance of quantized vortices in pioneering experiments on rotating quantum gases, a hallmark of superfluids or superconductors in a magnetic field. However, because of technical issues limiting the maximum rotation velocity, the metastable nature of the rotating state and the difficulty of applying stable rotating optical lattices, rotational approaches are not able to reach the large fields required for quantum Hall physics. Here we experimentally realize an optically synthesized magnetic field for ultracold neutral atoms, which is evident from the appearance of vortices in our Bose–Einstein condensate. Our approach uses a spatially dependent optical coupling between internal states of the atoms, yielding a Berry’s phase sufficient to create large synthetic magnetic fields, and is not subject to the limitations of rotating systems. With a suitable lattice configuration, it should be possible to reach the quantum Hall regime, potentially enabling studies of topological quantum computation.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/51f07509fa6c37e60b69b758c042c36b7ccd56a3

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Citations in the corpus

Creating artificial magnetic fields for cold atoms by photon-assisted tunneling (2010, background): “For atoms in a harmonic trap (no lattice) the Raman scheme with 3 spin states of the F = 1 electronic ground state of (87)Rb atom has been recently realized [11].”
Artificial gauge fields in materials and engineered systems (2017, neutral): “Here kL and EL denote the wave-vector and the recoil energy associated with the Raman beams [86].”
Generalized non-reciprocity in an optomechanical circuit via synthetic magnetism and reservoir engineering (2016, background): “Synthetic magnetism involving charge neutral elements such as atoms [2], polaritons [3–5], and photons [6– 10] is an area of active theoretical and experimental research, driven by the potential to simulate quantum many-body phenomena [11], reveal new topological wave effects [12, 13], and create de”
Quantum turbulence in trapped atomic Bose-Einstein condensates (2015, background): “Examples are bosonic Josephson junctions [18, 19] the Bose-Hubbard model [20], vortex lattices, synthetic gauge fields [21], hexagonal lattices and graphene [22], collapsing attractive systems (nicknamed ‘bosenova’) [23] and more.”
Time- and Site-Resolved Dynamics in a Topological Circuit (2013, background): “In cold atomic gases, gauge fields are generated either through spatially dependent Raman coupling of internal atomic states [10,14], or time- and space-periodic modulation of lattice tunneling rates [15,27,28].”
A synthetic electric force acting on neutral atoms (2010, background): “to generate effective vector potentials for neutral atoms through interactions with laser light, and have created synthetic magnetic field”
Spinor Bose gases: Symmetries, magnetism, and quantum dynamics (2013, methodology): “This means of synthesizing a gauge field for a neutralatom gas is related to that realized experimentally by the Spielman group (Lin et al., 2011, 2009).”
Fermi gases in one dimension: From Bethe ansatz to experiments (2013, background): “…in the study of ultracold atoms have opened up new opportunities to simulate synthetic external abelian and non-abelian gauge fields coupled to neutral atoms by controlling atomlight interactions (Lin et al., 2009) and the ultracoldatom analog of the mesoscopic conductor (Brantut et al., 2012).”
Floquet topological insulator in semiconductor quantum wells (2010, background): “Also, a similar philosophy led to proposals for effective magnetic field”