Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences - PIMS

Measuring the Hall effect for ultracold atoms in a synthetic magnetic field

Abstract:As ultracold atoms experiments move towards realistic
quantum simulations of many-body physics problems, new techniques are
being developed to increase the complexity of these systems.  While
the effects of real electric or magnetic fields are absent due to
the electrical neutrality of the atoms commonly used, recent
experiments have demonstrated how atom-light coupling can be used to
generate synthetic electric and magnetic fields [1].  In the scheme
presented here, the spatial dependence of a Raman coupling between levels of
the ground state manifold for our 87Rb atoms provides the
necessaryrelationship between internal (spin) and external (momentum)
degrees of freedom to generate a synthetic magnetic field and
associated Lorentz-like force.  We measured the Hall effect in a
Bose-Einstein condensate by studying its transport in the presence of the
syntheticfield.  These measurements reveal internal properties of the
system, much as the Hall effect is used to study solid-state systems,
and demonstrate the utility of this technique as a probe of
ultracold ensembles.[1] Y.-J. Lin, et al., Nature 462, 628 (2009);
Y.-J. Lin et al.,Nature Phys. 7, 531 (2011).

Location: SB 412

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