Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Visualizing edge states with an atomic Bose gas in the quantum Hall regime

Published

Author(s)

Ian B. Spielman, Ben Stuhl, Hsin I Lu, Lauren M. Aycock, Dina Genkina

Abstract

We engineered a two-dimensional magnetic lattice in an elongated strip geometry, with effective per-plaquette flux $\approx4/3$ times the flux quanta. We imaged the localized edge and bulk states of atomic Bose-Einstein condensates in this strip. Further, we observed both the skipping orbits of excited atoms traveling down our system's edges, analogues to edge magnetoplasmons in 2-D electron systems\cite{Kern1991,Ashoori1992}, and a dynamical Hall effect for bulk excitations\cite{LeBlanc2012}. Our lattice's long direction consisted of the sites of an optical lattice and its three-site wide narrow direction consisted of the internal atomic spin states\cite{Celi2014,Mancini2015}, effectively giving single lattice-site imaging resolution along the narrow direction. Our technique has minimal heating, a feature that will be important for spectroscopic measurements of the Hofstadter butterfly\cite{Hofstadter1976,Celi2014} and realizations of Laughlin's charge pump\cite{Laughlin1981}.
Citation
Science

Citation

Spielman, I. , Stuhl, B. , , H. , Aycock, L. and Genkina, D. (2016), Visualizing edge states with an atomic Bose gas in the quantum Hall regime, Science (Accessed March 28, 2024)
Created May 19, 2016, Updated February 19, 2017