Topological transport in a spin-orbit coupled bosonic Mott insulator

We investigate topological transport in a spin-orbit coupled bosonic Mott insulator. We show that interactions can lead to anomalous quasi-particle dynamics even when the spin-orbit coupling is abelian. To illustrate the latter, we consider the spin-orbit coupling realized in the experiment of Lin textit{et al}. [Nature (London) textbf{471}, 83 (2011)]. For this spin-orbit coupling, we compute the quasiparticle dispersions and spectral weights, the interaction-induced momentum space Berry curvature, and the momentum space distribution of spin density, and propose experimental signatures. Furthermore, we find that in our approximation for the single-particle propagator, the ground state can in principle support an integer Hall conductivity if the sum of the Chern numbers of the hole bands is nonzero.

Spin-Seebeck effect in a strongly interacting Fermi gas

We study the spin-Seebeck effect in a strongly interacting, two-component Fermi gas and propose an experiment to measure this effect by relatively displacing spin up and spin down atomic clouds in a trap using spin-dependent temperature gradients. We compute the spin-Seebeck coefficient and related spin-heat transport coefficients as functions of temperature and interaction strength. We find that when the inter-spin scattering length becomes larger than the Fermi wavelength, the spin-Seebeck coefficient changes sign as a function of temperature, and hence so does the direction of the spin-separation. We compute this zero-crossing temperature as a function of interaction strength and in particular in the unitary limit for the inter-spin scattering.

Spin Caloritronics in Noncondensed Bose Gases

We consider coupled spin and heat transport in a two-component, atomic Bose gas in the noncon- densed state. We find that the transport coefficients show a temperature dependence reflecting the bosonic enhancement of scattering, and discuss experimental signatures of the spin-heat coupling in spin accumulation and total dissipation. Inside the critical region of Bose-Einstein condensation, we find anomalous behavior of the transport coefficients, and in particular, an enhancement for the spin caloritronics figure of merit that determines the thermodynamic efficiency of spin-heat conversion.