Engineering Rashba-Dresselhaus Spin-Orbit Coupling for Cold Atoms using a Double Tripod Setup

Published

January 1, 2011

Author(s)

Ian B. Spielman, Gediminas Juzeliunas, Julius Ruseckas, Daniel Campbell

Abstract

We study the center of mass of motion of cold atoms affected by laser beams. The beams couple three atomic internal states to another two states to form a double tripod scheme. By properly choosing the amplitudes and phases of the laser fields the atom-light Hamiltonian contains a pair of degenerate eigenstates. They have the lowest energy and are separated from the remaining eigenstates by a gap determined by the Rabi frequencies of the atom-light coupling. Adiabatically eliminating the excited states, the resulting Hamiltonian of the remaining two internal states in- cludes either Rashba or Dresselhaus spin-orbit (SO) coupling. Unlike earlier proposals, here the SO coupled states are the two lowest energy “dressed” spin states and are thus immune to collisional relaxation. Finally, we discuss a specific implementation of our system using Raman transitions be- tween different hyperfine states within the electronic ground state manifold of nuclear spin I = 3/2 alkali atoms.

Citation

SPIE Conference Proceedings

Volume

7950

Pub Type

Journals

Keywords

Bose Einstein Condensate, quantum phase transitions

Citation

Spielman, I. , Juzeliunas, G. , Ruseckas, J. and Campbell, D. (2011), Engineering Rashba-Dresselhaus Spin-Orbit Coupling for Cold Atoms using a Double Tripod Setup, SPIE Conference Proceedings (Accessed November 13, 2025)