Synthetic magnetic fluxes on the honeycomb lattice

Abstract

We devise experimental schemes able to mimic uniform and staggered magnetic fluxes acting on ultracold two-electron atoms, such as ytterbium atoms, propagating in a honeycomb lattice. The atoms are first trapped into two independent state-selective triangular lattices and are further exposed to a suitable configuration of resonant Raman laser beams. These beams induce hops between the two triangular lattices and make atoms move in a honeycomb lattice. Atoms traveling around each unit cell of this honeycomb lattice pick up a nonzero phase. In the uniform case, the artificial magnetic flux sustained by each cell can reach about two flux quanta, thereby realizing a cold atom analogue of the Harper model with its notorious Hofstadter's butterfly structure. Different condensed-matter phenomena such as the relativistic integer and fractional quantum Hall effects, as observed in graphene samples, could be targeted with this scheme.Comment: 12 pages, 14 figure

Detection and manipulation of nuclear spin states in fermionic strontium

“…Fermions with two valence electrons, like 43 Ca, 87 Sr, 171 Yb, and 173 Yb, have a rich internal state structure, which is at the heart of recent proposals for quantum simulation and computation [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. Unlike bosonic isotopes of these elements, the fermions have a nuclear spin, which decouples from the electronic degrees of freedom in the 1 S 0 ground state and the 3 P 0 metastable state.…”

“…The nuclear spin is also essential for the implementation of artificial non-Abelian gauge fields [9,11,12]. Furthermore, it can be used to robustly store quantum information, which can be manipulated using the electronic structure [13,14].…”

Reservoir spectroscopy of5s5p3P2–5snStellmer1, Schreck2 2014Phys. Rev. A347441View full textAdd to dashboardCite

“…Quantum degenerate samples of Yb [7][8][9][10][11] and the alkaline-earth-metals Ca [12,13] and Sr [14][15][16][17][18][19][20] have opened new possibilities, such as the study of SU(N ) magnetism [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34], novel schemes to simulate gauge fields [35][36][37][38][39][40], the engineering of interactions beyond contact interactions [41][42][43][44], the creation of driven-dissipative many-body states [45], the simulation of an extra dimension [46], and new ways to perform quantum computation [47][48][49][50][51].…”

Half-integer Mott-insulator phases in the imbalanced honeycomb lattice

“…Future work will address the excitations of the system [30] as they can lead to additional experimental signatures. Finally, it would be interesting to study the impact of an external (non-Abelian) gauge field on the properties of the ground state [31][32][33].…”