No Arabic abstract
This article is a report of Projet bibliographique of M1 at Ecole Normale Superieure. In this article we reviewed the historical developments in artificial gauge fields and spin-orbit couplings in cold atom systems. We resorted to origins of literatures to trace the ideas of the developments. For pedagogical purposes, we tried to work out examples carefully and clearly, to verified the validity of various approximations and arguments in detail, and to give clear physical and mathematical pictures of the problems that we discussed. The first part of this article introduced the fundamental concepts of Berry phase and Jaynes-Cummings model. The second part reviewed two schemes to generate artificial gauge fields with N-pod scheme in cold atom systems. The first one is based on dressed-atom picture which provide a method to generate non-Abelian gauge fields with dark states. The second one is about rotating scheme which is achieved earlier historically. Non-Abelian gauge field inevitably leads to spin-orbit coupling. We reviewed some developments in achieve spin-orbital coupling theoretically and experimentally. The fourth part was devoted to recently developed idea of optical flux lattice that provides a possibility to reach the strongly correlated regime in cold atom systems. We developed a geometrical interpretation based on Coopers theory. Some useful formulae and their proofs were listed in the Appendix.
Cold atoms in an optical lattice with brick-wall geometry have been used to mimic graphene, a two-dimensional material with characteristic Dirac excitations. Here we propose to bring such artificial graphene into the proximity of a second atomic layer with a square lattice geometry. For non-interacting fermions, we find that such bilayer system undergoes a phase transition from a graphene-like semi-metal phase, characterized by a band structure with Dirac points, to a gapped band insulator phase. In the presence of attractive interactions between fermions with pseudospin-1/2 degree of freedom, a competition between semi-metal and superfluid behavior is found at the mean-field level. Using the quantum Monte Carlo method, we also investigate the case of strong repulsive interactions. In the Mott phase, each layer exhibits a different amount of long-range magnetic order. Upon coupling both layers, a valence-bond crystal is formed at a critical coupling strength. Finally, we discuss how these bilayer systems could be realized in existing cold atom experiments.
The Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) phase, a superconducting state with non-zero total momentum Cooper pairs in a large magnetic field, was first predicted about 50 years ago, and since then became an important concept in many branches of physics. Despite intensive search in various materials, unambiguous experimental evidence for the FFLO phase is still lacking in experiments. In this paper, we show that both FF (uniform order parameter with plane-wave phase) and LO phase (spatially varying order parameter amplitude) can be observed using fermionic cold atoms in spin-orbit coupled optical lattices. The increasing spin-orbit coupling enhances the FF phase over the LO phase. The coexistence of superfluid and magnetic orders is also found in the normal BCS phase. The pairing mechanism for different phases is understood by visualizing superfluid pairing densities in different spin-orbit bands. The possibility of observing similar physics using spin-orbit coupled superconducting ultra-thin films is also discussed.
We consider a system with spin-orbit coupling and derive equations of motion which include the effects of Berry curvatures. We apply these equations to investigate the dynamics of particles with equal Rashba-Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling in one dimension. In our derivation, the adiabatic transformation is performed first and leads to quantum Heisenberg equations of motion for momentum and position operators. These equations explicitly contain position-space, momentum-space, and phase-space Berry curvature terms. Subsequently, we perform the semiclassical approximation, and obtain the semiclassical equations of motion. Taking the low-Berry-curvature limit results in equations that can be directly compared to previous results for the motion of wavepackets. Finally, we show that in the semiclassical regime, the effective mass of the equal Rashba-Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupled system can be viewed as a direct effect of the phase-space Berry curvature.
We propose an innovative quantum emulator based on Moire superlattices showing that, by employing periodical modulation on each lattice site, one can create tunable, artificial gauge fields with imprinting Peierls phases on the hopping parameters and realize an analog of novel Haldane-like phase. As an application, we provide a methodology to directly quantify the topological invariant in such a system from a dynamical quench process. This design shows a robustly integrated platform which opens a new door to investigate topological physics.
Spin-orbit coupling (SOC) is an essential ingredient in topological materials, conventional and quantum-gas based alike.~Engineered spin-orbit coupling in ultracold atom systems --unique in their experimental control and measurement opportunities-- provides a major opportunity to investigate and understand topological phenomena.~Here we experimentally demonstrate and theoretically analyze a technique for controlling SOC in a two component Bose-Einstein condensate using amplitude-modulated Raman coupling.