Spin-orbit coupled fermions in an optical lattice clock

Abstract

Engineered spin-orbit coupling (SOC) in cold atom systems can aid in the study of novel synthetic materials and complex condensed matter phenomena. Despite great advances, alkali atom SOC systems are hindered by heating from spontaneous emission, which limits the observation of many-body effects, motivating research into potential alternatives. Here we demonstrate that SOC can be engineered to occur naturally in a one-dimensional fermionic 87Sr optical lattice clock (OLC). In contrast to previous SOC experiments, in this work the SOC is both generated and probed using a direct ultra-narrow optical clock transition between two electronic orbital states. We use clock spectroscopy to prepare lattice band populations, internal electronic states, and quasimomenta, as well as to produce SOC dynamics. The exceptionally long lifetime of the excited clock state (160 s) eliminates decoherence and atom loss from spontaneous emission at all relevant experimental timescales, allowing subsequent momentum- and spin-resolved in situ probing of the SOC band structure and eigenstates. We utilize these capabilities to study Bloch oscillations, spin-momentum locking, and Van Hove singularities in the transition density of states. Our results lay the groundwork for the use of OLCs to probe novel SOC phases of matter.

17 pages, 4 figures, and Methods section with 3 Extended Data figures. Reformatted from previous version, with reduced length and reduced number of citations to match journal format

References in corpus (13)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• Spin-Injection Spectroscopy of a Spin-Orbit Coupled Fermi Gas
• Systematic evaluation of an atomic clock at 2e-18 total uncertainty
• Degenerate Quantum Gases with Spin-Orbit Coupling
• Dynamical control of matter-wave tunneling in periodic potentials
• Strongly Correlated Quantum Walks in Optical Lattices
• Spectroscopic observation of SU(N)-symmetric interactions in Sr orbital magnetism
• Synthetic dimensions and spin-orbit coupling with an optical clock transition
• An Aharonov-Bohm interferometer for determining Bloch band topology
• State preparation and dynamics of ultracold atoms in higher lattice orbitals
• Probing non-Abelian statistics of Majorana fermions in ultracold atomic superfluid
• Spin-orbit coupled two-electron Fermi gases of ytterbium atoms
• Effective many-body parameters for atoms in non-separable Gaussian optical potentials

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Semi-synthetic zigzag optical lattice for ultracold bosons
• State-dependent interactions in ultracold ${}^{174}$Yb probed by optical clock spectroscopy
• Clock spectroscopy of interacting bosons in deep optical lattices
• Fast and dense magneto-optical traps for Strontium
• Strings of ultracold molecules in a synthetic dimension
• Tail-free self-accelerating solitons and vortices
• Photovoltaic Effect of Atomtronics Induced by Artificial Gauge Field
• Finite-temperature properties of interacting bosons on a two-leg flux ladder
• Interaction-induced exotic vortex states in an optical lattice clock with spin-orbit coupling
• Efficiency of fermionic quantum distillation
• Symmetry-enriched Bose-Einstein condensates in spin-orbit coupled bilayer system