The method of synthetic gauge potentials opens up a new avenue for our understanding and discovering novel quantum states of matter. We investigate the topological quantum phase transition of Fermi gases trapped in a honeycomb lattice in the presence of a synthetic non-Abelian gauge potential. We develop a systematic fermionic effective field theory to describe a topological quantum phase transition tuned by the non-Abelian gauge potential and explore its various important experimental consequences. Numerical calculations on lattice scales are performed to compare with the results achieved by the fermionic effective field theory. Several possible experimental detection methods of topological quantum phase transition are proposed. In contrast to condensed matter experiments where only gauge invariant quantities can be measured, both gauge invariant and non-gauge invariant quantities can be measured by experimentally generating various non-Abelian gauges corresponding to the same set of Wilson loops.

We investigate the non-Abelian Josephson effect in F=2 spinor Bose-Einstein condensates with double optical traps. We propose a real physical system which contains non-Abelian Josephson effect and has very different density and spin tunneling characters compared with the Abelian case. We calculate the frequencies of the pseudo Goldstone modes in different phases between two traps, respectively, which are the crucial feature of the non-Abelian Josephson effect. We also give an experimental protocol to observe this novel effect in future experiments.