Experimental realization of two-dimensional synthetic spin–orbit coupling in ultracold Fermi gases

By Lianghui Huang, Zengming Meng, Pengjun Wang, P. Peng, Shaoliang Zhang, Liangchao Chen, Donghao Li, Qi Zhou, Jing Zhang. Nature Physics, 2015

334 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Spin–orbit coupling in two dimensions is essential for observing topological phases in ultracold atoms. Such a coupling was produced in a gas of potassium atoms and a robust Dirac point was observed in the energy dispersions of the dressed atoms. Spin–orbit coupling (SOC) is central to many physical phenomena, including fine structures of atomic spectra and topological phases in ultracold atoms. Whereas, in general, SOC is fixed in a system, laser–atom interaction provides a means to create and control synthetic SOC in ultracold atoms1. Despite significant experimental progress in this area2,3,4,5,6,7,8, two-dimensional (2D) synthetic SOC, which is crucial for exploring two- and three-dimensional topological phases, is lacking. Here, we report the experimental realization of 2D SOC in ultracold 40K Fermi gases using three lasers, each of which dresses one atomic hyperfine spin state. Through spin-injection radiofrequency (rf) spectroscopy4, we probe the spin-resolved energy dispersions of the dressed atoms, and observe a highly controllable Dirac point created by the 2D SOC. These results constitute a step towards the realization of new topological states of matter.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/707dc142a0e2fc3f4c95c3cb78fbdaad04a7bcf4

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Artificial gauge fields in materials and engineered systems (2017, positive): “The dispersion relation also exhibits a Dirac point that was probed using radio frequency spectroscopy in reference [375].”
Topological bands for ultracold atoms (2018, positive): “A predecessor of this setup described by Wu et al. (2016) generated a 2D optical lattice with spin-orbit coupling with 87Rb atoms (a first realization of 2D spin-orbit coupling was reported by Huang et al. (2016) for a bulk geometry).”