Synthetic dimensions and spin-orbit coupling with an optical clock transition

Abstract

We demonstrate a novel way of synthesizing spin-orbit interactions in ultracold quantum gases, based on a single-photon optical clock transition coupling two long-lived electronic states of two-electron ${}^{173}$Yb atoms. By mapping the electronic states onto effective sites along a synthetic "electronic" dimension, we have engineered synthetic fermionic ladders with tunable magnetic fluxes. We have detected the spin-orbit coupling with fiber-link-enhanced clock spectroscopy and directly measured the emergence of chiral edge currents, probing them as a function of the magnetic field flux. These results open new directions for the investigation of topological states of matter with ultracold atomic gases.

Minor changes with respect to v1 (we have corrected some typos, fixed the use of some mathematical symbols, added one reference)

References in corpus (7)

• Spin-Injection Spectroscopy of a Spin-Orbit Coupled Fermi Gas
• Topological Quantum Matter with Ultracold Gases in Optical Lattices
• Degenerate Quantum Gases with Spin-Orbit Coupling
• Tunable gauge potential for neutral and spinless particles in driven lattices
• An Aharonov-Bohm interferometer for determining Bloch band topology
• Coherent optical frequency transfer at 5e-19 over a doubled 642 km fiber link
• Quantum simulation of non-trivial topology

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Spin-orbit coupled fermions in an optical lattice clock
• Symmetry-broken states in a system of interacting bosons on a two-leg ladder with a uniform Abelian gauge field
• Semi-synthetic zigzag optical lattice for ultracold bosons
• Synthetic Dimensions with Magnetic Fields and Local Interactions in Photonic Lattices
• Clock spectroscopy of interacting bosons in deep optical lattices
• State-dependent interactions in ultracold ${}^{174}$Yb probed by optical clock spectroscopy
• Strings of ultracold molecules in a synthetic dimension
• Tail-free self-accelerating solitons and vortices
• Photovoltaic Effect of Atomtronics Induced by Artificial Gauge Field
• Spin-gap spectroscopy in a bosonic flux ladder
• Interaction-induced exotic vortex states in an optical lattice clock with spin-orbit coupling
• Efficiency of fermionic quantum distillation
• Generating topological optical flux lattices for ultracold atoms by modulated Raman and radio-frequency couplings
• Topological Color-Hall Insulators: SU(3) Fermions in Optical Lattices