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.

12 pages, 14 figures

References in corpus (19)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• Quantum phase transition from a superfluid to a Mott insulator in a gas of ultracold atoms
• Ultracold atomic gases in optical lattices: mimicking condensed matter physics and beyond
• Synthetic magnetic fields for ultracold neutral atoms
• A Bose-Einstein Condensate in a Uniform Light-induced Vector Potential
• Non-Abelian gauge potentials for ultra-cold atoms with degenerate dark states
• Multi-Component Quantum Gases in Spin-Dependent Hexagonal Lattices
• Degenerate Fermi Gases of Ytterbium
• Simulation and detection of Dirac fermions with cold atoms in an optical lattice
• Realization of SU(2)*SU(6) Fermi System
• A new magnetic field dependence of Landau levels on a graphene like structure
• Two-color photoassociation spectroscopy of ytterbium atoms and the precise determinations of s-wave scattering lengths
• Non-Abelian optical lattices: Anomalous quantum Hall effect and Dirac Fermions
• Optical Flux Lattices for Ultracold Atomic Gases
• Staggered-Vortex Superfluid of Ultracold Bosons in an Optical Lattice
• Ultracold Fermions in a Graphene-Type Optical Lattice
• All-Optical Formation of Quantum Degenerate Mixtures
• Topological Insulators and Metals in Atomic Optical Lattices
• Massless Dirac Fermions in a Square Optical Lattice

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Light-induced gauge fields for ultracold atoms
• Production of quantum degenerate strontium gases: Larger, better, faster, colder
• Topological phase transitions between chiral and helical spin textures in a lattice with spin-orbit coupling and a magnetic field
• Reservoir spectroscopy of 5s5p ${}^3$P${}_2$ - 5s$n$d ${}^3$D${}_{1,2,3}$ transitions in strontium
• Realization of uniform synthetic magnetic fields by periodically shaking an optical square lattice
• Topological multiferroic phases in the extended Kane-Mele-Hubbard Model in the Hofstadter regime
• Half-integer Mott-insulator phases in the imbalanced honeycomb lattice