Synthetic Electric and Magnetic Fields for Ultracold Neutral Atoms

Published

January 1, 2011

Author(s)

William D. Phillips, Yu-Ju Lin, Robert L. Compton, Karina K. Jimenez Garcia, Abigail R. Perry, James V. Porto, Ian B. Spielman

Abstract

We use Raman coupling between magnetic sublevels of a 87Rb Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) to create an effective vector gauge field for the neutral atoms. They behave as if they were charged particles in a magnetic vector potential. With appropriate spatial gradients and time derivatives of this vector potential we produce synthetic magnetic and electric fields for the atoms. This paper is a brief summary of the presentation made by the first author at ICAP 2010 in Cairns, Australia. It is not intended as a complete report on the research described, nor does it attempt to be a fully referenced documentation of that research and the relevant literature. We do, however, provide references to the published work where a more complete description and more complete references to related literature may be found.

Proceedings Title

International Conference on Atomic Physics (ICAP) 2010. (World Scientific)

Volume

264

Conference Dates

July 25-30, 2010

Conference Location

Cairns

Pub Type

Conferences

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Keywords

Bose-Einstein condensation, cold atomic gases, quantum simulation, synthetic electric field, synthetic magnetic field, vector gauge field

Citation

Phillips, W. , Lin, Y. , Compton, R. , Jimenez, K. , Perry, A. , Porto, J. and Spielman, I. (2011), Synthetic Electric and Magnetic Fields for Ultracold Neutral Atoms, International Conference on Atomic Physics (ICAP) 2010. (World Scientific), Cairns, -1, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=907486 (Accessed October 10, 2025)