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I will briefly review some recent developments on how to achieve and manipulate effective gauge fields for ultracold atoms. Starting with some historical remarks on effective gauge theories in molecular and time-dependent systems, I move on to show how this translates to ultracold atoms exposed to spatially varying laser fields. This research has gained great attention lately, and the experimental efforts are seriously beginning to pay off. At the present, the non-Abelian case has not been experimentally demonstrated but will in the near future... An important example of a non-Abelian gauge potential is the one of Rashba, which for a particular choice of atom-laser configuration can be constructed in these systems. This opens the door for sudies of effects such as, spin Hall currents, relativistic Zitterbewegung, half quantized vortices. Combined with optical lattices, there's even hope to explore quantized Hall physics and interesting physics that comes with it.

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Dr. Jonas Larson, University of Cologne and Stockholm University
Seminarraum Theoretische Physik
Contact: not specified