Light-induced gauge fields for ultracold atoms

By Nathan Goldman, G. Juzeliūnas, P. Öhberg, Ian B. Spielman. Reports on progress in physics. Physical Society, 2013

982 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Gauge fields are central in our modern understanding of physics at all scales. At the highest energy scales known, the microscopic universe is governed by particles interacting with each other through the exchange of gauge bosons. At the largest length scales, our Universe is ruled by gravity, whose gauge structure suggests the existence of a particle—the graviton—that mediates the gravitational force. At the mesoscopic scale, solid-state systems are subjected to gauge fields of different nature: materials can be immersed in external electromagnetic fields, but they can also feature emerging gauge fields in their low-energy description. In this review, we focus on another kind of gauge field: those engineered in systems of ultracold neutral atoms. In these setups, atoms are suitably coupled to laser fields that generate effective gauge potentials in their description. Neutral atoms ‘feeling’ laser-induced gauge potentials can potentially mimic the behavior of an electron gas subjected to a magnetic field, but also, the interaction of elementary particles with non-Abelian gauge fields. Here, we review different realized and proposed techniques for creating gauge potentials—both Abelian and non-Abelian—in atomic systems and discuss their implication in the context of quantum simulation. While most of these setups concern the realization of background and classical gauge potentials, we conclude with more exotic proposals where these synthetic fields might be made dynamical, in view of simulating interacting gauge theories with cold atoms.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0eb44bf75583a16add3c5925c7f57a88332fe598

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Citations in the corpus

Perfect quantum state transfer in a superconducting qubit chain with parametrically tunable couplings. (2018, methodology): “In addition, our scheme can be generalized to a two-dimensional lattice, where the tunable amplitudes and phases of the coupling strengths allow quantum simulation of lattice models [40, 55].”
Programmable quantum simulations of spin systems with trapped ions (2019, background): “In a broader context, such time-periodic manipulations have long been used for controlling quantum systems including NMR qubits and atomic ensembles (Goldman et al., 2014; Oka and Kitamura, 2019).”
Topological photonics (2018, background): “…systems in solidstate materials, topological phases of matter are also being actively studied in other quantum many-body systems, in particular, liquid helium (Volovik, 2009) and ultracold atomic gases (Cooper, 2008; Dalibard et al., 2011; Goldman et al., 2014; Goldman, Budich, and Zoller, 2016).”
Topological quantum matter with ultracold gases in optical lattices (2016, methodology): “using rotation [11] or atomlight coupling [12, 13].”
Measuring the Chern number of Hofstadter bands with ultracold bosonic atoms (2014, methodology): “Considering cold atoms in optical lattices, it has been shown theoretically that semiclassical dynamics could allow for an observation of the Berry curvature through transport measurements, and could lead to a determination of the Chern number characterizing topological Bloch bands [4, 7, 10, 11].”
Roadmap on topological photonics (2022, neutral): “Synthetic gauge fields were pioneered in atom-optical settings, where rotations induce a Coriolis force and spatially patterned atom–laser interactions induce phase shifts that replicate the effect of a magnetic flux [47, 48].”
(INVITED) Vortex solitons: Old results and new perspectives (2019, neutral): “[234] N.”
Periodically Driven Quantum Systems: Effective Hamiltonians and Engineered Gauge Fields (2014, background): “Periodically Driven Quantum Systems: Effective Hamiltonians and Engineered Gauge Fields.”