We investigate the confinement induced resonance in spin-orbit coupled cold atoms with Raman coupling. We find that the quasi-bound levels induced by the spin-orbit coupling and Raman coupling result in the Feshbach-type resonances. For sufficiently large Raman coupling, the bound states in one dimension exist only for sufficiently strong attractive interaction. Furthermore, the bound states in quasi-one dimension exist only for sufficient large ratio of the length scale of confinement to three dimensional s-wave scattering length. The Raman coupling substantially changes the confinement-induced resonance position. We give a proposal to realize confinement induced resonance by increasing the Raman coupling strength in experiments.
In this work, we describe a method to realize 3D Weyl semimetal by coupling multilayers of honeycomb optical lattice in the presence of a pair of Raman lasers. The Raman lasers render each isolated honeycomb layer a Chern insulator. With finite interlayer coupling, the bulk gap of the system closes at certain out-of-plane momenta due to Raman assisted tunnelling and result in the Weyl semimetal phase. Using experimentally relevant parameters, we show that both one and two pairs of Weyl points can be realized by tuning the interlayer coupling strength. We suggest that Landau-Zener tunnelling ca…
We consider ultracold atoms subjected to a cavity-assisted two-photon Raman transition. The Raman coupling gives rise to effective spin-orbit interaction which couples atom's center-of-mass motion to its pseudospin degrees of freedom. Meanwhile, the cavity photon is dynamically affected by the atom. This feedback between atom and photon leads to a dramatic modification of the atomic dispersion relation, and further leads to dynamical instability of the system. We propose to detect the change of cavity photon number as a direct way to demonstrate dynamical instability.
We show that ultra-cold atoms with synthetic spin-orbit coupling in Raman lattices can be used as versatile quantum simulators to explore the connections between correlated Chern insulators and strongly-coupled four-Fermi field theories related to the Gross-Neveu model in (2+1) dimensions. Exploiting this multidisciplinary perspective, we identify a large-$N$ quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) effect in absence of any external magnetic field, and use it to delimit regions in parameter space where these correlated topological phases appear, the boundaries of which are controlled by strongly-coupled f…
We analyze the single particle quantum mechanics of an atom whose dispersion is modified by spin orbit coupling to Raman lasers. We calculate how the novel dispersion leads to unusual single particle physics. We focus on the symmetry of the ground state wavefunction in different potentials.
Standard analytical construction of the many-body wave function of interacting particles in one dimension, beyond mean-field theory, is based on the Jastrow approach. The many-body interacting ground state is build up from the ground state of the non-interacting system and the product of solutions of the corresponding interacting two-body problem. However, this is possible only if the center-of-mass motion is decoupled from the mutual interactions. In our work, based on the general constraints given by contact nature of the atom-atom interactions, we present an alternative approach to the stan…
We study a transition between a homogeneous and an inhomogeneous phase in a system of one-dimensional, Raman tunnel-coupled Bose gases. The homogeneous phase shows a flat density and phase profile, whereas the inhomogeneous ground state is characterized by periodic density ripples, and a soliton staircase in the phase difference. We show that under experimentally viable conditions the transition can be tuned by the wavevector difference $Q$ of the Raman beams and can be described by the Pokrovsky-Talapov model for the relative phase between the two condensates. Local imaging available in atom …
We propose coupling two internal atomic states using a pair of Raman beams operated in Laguerre-Gaussian laser modes with unequal phase windings. This generates a coupling between the atom's pseudo-spin and its orbital angular momentum. We analyze the single-particle properties of the system using realistic parameters and provide detailed studies of the spin texture of the ground state. Finally, we consider a weakly interacting atomic condensate subject to this angular spin-orbit coupling and show how the inter-atomic interactions modifies the single-particle physics.
In the presence of a laser-induced spin-orbit coupling an interacting ultra cold spinor Bose-Einstein condensate may acquire a quasi-relativistic character described by a non-linear Dirac-like equation. We show that as a result of the spin-orbit coupling and the non-linearity the condensate may become self-trapped, resembling the so-called chiral confinement, previously studied in the context of the massive Thirring model. We first consider 1D geometries where the self-confined condensates present an intriguing sinusoidal dependence on the inter-particle interactions. We further show that mult…
We study the stability of quantum droplet and its associated phase transitions in ultracold Bose-Bose mixtures uniformly confined in quasi-two-dimension. We show that the confinement-induced boundary effect can be significant when increasing the atom number or reducing the confinement length, which destabilizes the quantum droplet towards the formation of a soliton bound state. In particular, as increasing the atom number we find the reentrance of soliton ground state, while the droplet is stabilized only within a finite number window that sensitively depends on the confinement length. Near th…
We study the interplay effect of spin-orbit coupling(SOC) and optical lattice to the single-particle physics and superfluid-insulator transition in ultracold Fermi gases. We consider the type of SOC that has been realized in cold atoms experiments via two-photon Raman processes. Our analyses are based on the knowledge of full single-particle spectrum in lattices, without relying on any tightbinding approximation.We evaluate existing tight-binding models and point out their limitations in predicting the correct single-particle physics due to the missed high-band contributions. Moreover, we show…
We propose a method to prepare Majorana pairs at the corners of imprinted defects on a two-dimensional cold atom optical lattice with $s$-wave superfluid pairing. Different from previous proposals that manipulate the effective Dirac masses, our scheme relies on the sign flip of the spin-orbit coupling at the corners, which can be tuned in experiments by adjusting the angle of incident Raman lasers. The Majorana corner pairs are found to be located at the interface between two regimes with opposite spin orbit coupling strengths in an anticlockwise direction and are robust against certain symmet…
Understanding the nature of confinement, as well as its relation with the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry, remains one of the long-standing questions in high-energy physics. The difficulty of this task stems from the limitations of current analytical and numerical techniques to address non-perturbative phenomena in non-Abelian gauge theories. In this work, we show how similar phenomena emerge in simpler models, and how these can be further investigated using state-of-the-art cold-atom quantum simulators. More specifically, we introduce the rotor Jackiw-Rebbi model, a (1+1)-dimensional …
We start by reviewing the concept of gauge invariance in quantum mechanics, for Abelian and Non-Ableian cases. Then we idescribe how the various gauge potential and field can be associated with the geometrical phase acquired by a quantum mechanical wave function while adiabatically evolving in a parameter space. Subsequently we show how this concept is exploited to generate light induced gauge field for neutral ultra cold bosonic atoms. As an example of such light induced Abelian and Non Abelian gauge field for ultra cold atoms we disucss ultra cold atoms in a rotating trap and creation of syn…
We study the ground-state properties of a two-component one-dimensional system of a few ultra-cold fermions with attractive interactions. We show that, by ramping up an external potential barrier felt by one of the components, it is possible to induce regions of exotic superfluid phases, characterized by a tunable finite net momentum of the Cooper pair, without changing the overall spin populations. We show that these phases, which are the few-body analogs of the celebrated Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov state, can be distinguished by analyzing a specific two-particle correlation encoded in …
We consider a cold two-species atomic Fermi gas confined in a trap. We combine the Hermitian coupling between the states (we assume them to be the states with different spins) with the Cooper pairing of atoms with these different spins. This opens up a new prospect for investigation of interplay between various phenomena involving Raman coupling (e.g., atom lasers, dark-state polaritons) and effects caused by Cooper pairing of particles (e.g., superfluidity). We have obtained a threshold of transition from oscillatory to amplifying behavior of matter waves.
In this paper we investigate the properties of Bose gases with Raman-induced spin-orbit(SO) coupling. It is found that the SO coupling can greatly modify the single particle density-of-state, and thus lead to non-monotonic behavior of the condensate depletion, the Lee-Huang-Yang correction of ground-state energy and the transition temperature of a non-interacting Bose-Einstein condensate. The presence of the SO coupling also breaks the Galilean invariance, and this gives two different critical velocities, corresponding to the movement of the condensate and the impurity respectively. Finally, w…
We study spatially indirect excitons confined in a 10 $μ$m wide electrostatic trap of a GaAs double quantum well. We introduce a technique to control the amplitude of the electric field interacting with the excitons electric dipole, with nanosecond precision. Our approach relies on electronic waveforms corrected for the distorsions occurring at highest frequencies so that impedance matching is not necessary. Thus, we manipulate the confinement of cold gases without inducing sizeable perturbations down to sub-Kelvin bath temperatures.
We propose a scheme to dynamically generate optical flux lattices with nontrivial band topology using amplitude-modulated Raman lasers and radio-frequency (rf) magnetic fields. By tuning the strength of Raman and rf fields, three distinct phases are realized at unit filling for a unit cell. Respectively, these three phases correspond to normal insulator, topological Chern insulator, and semimetal. Nearly nondispersive bands are found to appear in the topological phase, which promises opportunities for investigating strongly correlated quantum states within a simple cold-atom setup. The validit…
We present a sequence of driven-dissipative protocols for controlling cold atoms in tilted optical lattices. These experimentally accessible examples are templates that demonstrate how dissipation can be used to manipulate quantum many-body systems. We consider bosonic atoms trapped in a tilted optical lattice, immersed in a superfluid bath, and excited by coherent Raman lasers. With these ingredients, we are able to controllably transport atoms in the lattice and produce self-healing quantum states: a Mott insulator and the topologically ordered spin-1 AKLT state.
It is shown that a simple modification of the geometry in which Raman lasers are applied to a cold gas in an optical lattice results in transforming the emerging effective electromagnetic field into a pure gauge. This contrived gauge-away effect can be observed experimentally by measuring the Mott-Insulator to Superfluid critical point. The underlying mechanism for this phenomenon is the ability to engineer the transfer of the transverse component of the gauge potential into its longitudinal one.
A double-helix optical trapping potential for cold atoms can be straightforwardly created inside the evanescent field of an optical nanofiber. It suffices to send three circularly polarized light fields through the nanofiber; two counterpropagating and far red-detuned with respect to the atomic transition and the third far blue-detuned. Assuming realistic experimental parameters, the transverse confinement of the resulting potential allows one to reach the one-dimensional regime with cesium atoms for temperatures of several \muK. Moreover, by locally varying the nanofiber diameter, the radius …
We present a method for amplifying a single or scattered impurities immersed in a background gas of ultra cold atoms so that they can be optically imaged and spatially resolved. Our approach relies on a Raman transfer between two stable atomic hyperfine states that is conditioned on the presence of an impurity atom. The amplification is based on the strong interaction among atoms excited to Rydberg states. We perform a detailed analytical study of the performance of the proposed scheme with particular emphasis on the influence of many-body effects.
We introduce a new approach to create and detect Majorana fermions using optically trapped 1D fermionic atoms. In our proposed setup, two internal states of the atoms couple via an optical Raman transition---simultaneously inducing an effective spin-orbit interaction and magnetic field---while a background molecular BEC cloud generates s-wave pairing for the atoms. The resulting cold atom quantum wire supports Majorana fermions at phase boundaries between topologically trivial and nontrivial regions, as well as `Floquet Majorana fermions' when the system is periodically driven. We analyze expe…
We focus on a technique recently implemented for controlling the magnitude of synthetic spin-orbit coupling (SOC) in ultra-cold atoms in the Raman-coupling scenario. This technique uses a periodic modulation of the Raman-coupling amplitude to tune the SOC. Specifically, it has been shown that the effect of a high-frequency sinusoidal modulation of the Raman-laser intensity can be incorporated into the undriven Hamiltonian via effective parameters, whose adiabatic variation can then be used to steer the SOC. Here, we characterize the heating mechanisms that can be relevant to this method. We id…
We propose a scalable analog quantum simulator for quantum electrodynamics (QED) in two spatial dimensions. The setup for the U(1) lattice gauge field theory employs inter-species spin-changing collisions in an ultra-cold atomic mixture trapped in an optical lattice. Building on the previous one-dimensional implementation scheme of Ref. [1] we engineer spatial plaquette terms for magnetic fields, thus solving a major obstacle towards experimental realizations of realistic gauge theories in higher dimensions. We apply our approach to pure gauge theory and discuss how the phenomenon of confineme…
