No Arabic abstract
We propose a scheme to dynamically synthesize a space-periodic effective magnetic field for neutral atoms by time-periodic magnetic field pulses. When atomic spin adiabatically follows the direction of the effective magnetic field, an adiabatic scalar potential together with a geometric vector potential emerges for the atomic center-of-mass motion, due to the Berry phase effect. While atoms hop between honeycomb lattice sites formed by the minima of the adiabatic potential, complex Peierls phase factors in the hopping coefficients are induced by the vector potential, which facilitate a topological Chern insulator. With further tuning of external parameters, both a topological phase transition and topological flat bands can be achieved, highlighting realistic prospects for studying strongly correlated phenomena in this system. Our Letter presents an alternative pathway towards creating and manipulating topological states of ultracold atoms by magnetic fields.
There have been significant recent advances in realizing bandstructures with geometrical and topological features in experiments on cold atomic gases. We provide an overview of these developments, beginning with a summary of the key concepts of geometry and topology for Bloch bands. We describe the different methods that have been used to generate these novel bandstructures for cold atoms, as well as the physical observables that have allowed their characterization. We focus on the physical principles that underlie the different experimental approaches, providing a conceptual framework within which to view these developments. However, we also describe how specific experimental implementations can influence physical properties. Moving beyond single-particle effects, we describe the forms of inter-particle interactions that emerge when atoms are subjected to these energy bands, and some of the many-body phases that may be sought in future experiments.
Ultracold atom research presents many avenues to study problems at the forefront of physics. Due to their unprecedented controllability, these systems are ideally suited to explore new exotic states of matter, which is one of the key driving elements of the condensed matter research. One such topic of considerable importance is topological insulators, materials that are insulating in the interior but conduct along the edges. Quantum Hall and its close cousin Quantum Spin Hall states belong to the family of these exotic states and are the subject of this chapter.
We study superconductivity in an ultracold Bose-Fermi mixture loaded into a square optical lattice subjected to a staggered flux. While the bosons form a superfluid at very low temperature and weak interaction, the interacting fermions experience an additional long-ranged attractive interaction mediated by phonons in the bosonic superfluid. This leads us to consider a generalized Hubbard model with on-site and nearest-neighbor attractive interactions, which give rise to two competing superconducting channels. We use the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory to determine the regimes where distinct superconducting ground states are stabilized, and find that the non-local pairing channel favors a superconducting ground state which breaks both the gauge and the lattice symmetries, thus realizing unconventional superconductivity. Furthermore, the particular structure of the single-particle spectrum leads to unexpected consequences, for example, a dome-shaped superconducting region in the temperature versus filing fraction phase diagram, with a normal phase that comprises much richer physics than a Fermi-liquid. Notably, the relevant temperature regime and coupling strength is readily accessible in state of the art experiments with ultracold trapped atoms.
Scalable, coherent many-body systems can enable the realization of previously unexplored quantum phases and have the potential to exponentially speed up information processing. Thermal fluctuations are negligible and quantum effects govern the behavior of such systems with extremely low temperature. We report the cooling of a quantum simulator with 10,000 atoms and mass production of high-fidelity entangled pairs. In a two-dimensional plane, we cool Mott insulator samples by immersing them into removable superfluid reservoirs, achieving an entropy per particle of $1.9^{+1.7}_{-0.4} times 10^{-3} k_{text{B}}$. The atoms are then rearranged into a two-dimensional lattice free of defects. We further demonstrate a two-qubit gate with a fidelity of 0.993 $pm$ 0.001 for entangling 1250 atom pairs. Our results offer a setting for exploring low-energy many-body phases and may enable the creation of large-scale entanglement
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 states 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, made 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 Berrys 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.