Effective magnetic fields for stationary light

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to generate effective magnetic fields for stationary-light polaritons, enabling the simulation of quantum Hall physics and potentially facilitating studies of fractional quantum Hall effects in optical systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to create gauge potentials for stationary-light polaritons in multiple dimensions using rotating atomic ensembles.

Findings

Degenerate Landau levels with high degeneracy are achievable.

The method allows for large effective interaction areas for polaritons.

It opens pathways to study bosonic fractional quantum Hall effects.

Abstract

We describe a method to create effective gauge potentials for stationary-light polaritons in two or three spatial dimensions. When stationary light is created in the interaction with a uniformly rotating ensemble of coherently driven double $\Lambda$ atoms, the equation of motion is that of a massive Schr\"odinger particle in an effective magnetic field. In addition a repulsive scalar potential emerges which can however be compensated by a space-dependent detuning. Since the effective interaction area for the polaritons can be made large, degenerate Landau levels can be created with degeneracy well above 100. This opens the possibility to study the bosonic analogue of the fractional quantum Hall effect for interacting stationary-light polaritons.