Tunable gauge potential for neutral and spinless particles in driven lattices

TL;DR

This paper introduces a universal method to generate tunable artificial gauge potentials for neutral particles in optical lattices using periodic inertial forces, enabling control over quantum states and magnetic flux simulations.

Contribution

The authors develop and experimentally demonstrate a method to create tunable gauge potentials without relying on particle internal structure, advancing quantum simulation capabilities.

Findings

Successfully realized artificial gauge potentials in optical lattices.

Generated ground state superfluids at arbitrary non-zero quasi-momentum.

Proposed schemes for creating tunable magnetic fluxes for strong-field physics simulations.

Abstract

We present a universal method to create a tunable, artificial vector gauge potential for neutral particles trapped in an optical lattice. The necessary Peierls phase of the hopping parameters between neighboring lattice sites is generated by applying a suitable periodic inertial force such that the method does not rely on any internal structure of the particles. We experimentally demonstrate the realization of such artificial potentials, which generate ground state superfluids at arbitrary non-zero quasi-momentum. We furthermore investigate possible implementations of this scheme to create tuneable magnetic fluxes, going towards model systems for strong-field physics.