A solenoidal synthetic field and the non-Abelian Aharonov-Bohm effects in neutral atoms

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to create a tiny, solenoid-shaped artificial magnetic field in cold neutral atoms, enabling the observation of non-Abelian Aharonov-Bohm effects with large fluxes in a controllable quantum system.

Contribution

It introduces a novel scheme to generate a microscopic solenoid-like gauge field in cold atoms, facilitating the study of non-Abelian gauge effects in quantum simulations.

Findings

Successful design of a micrometer-scale solenoid for cold atoms.

Proposal of Abelian and non-Abelian gauge field generation using LG lasers.

Observation of magnetic Aharonov-Bohm interference patterns in optical lattices.

Abstract

Cold neutral atoms provide a versatile and controllable platform for emulating various quantum systems. Despite efforts to develop artificial gauge fields in these systems, realizing a unique ideal-solenoid-shaped magnetic field within the quantum domain in any real-world physical system remains elusive. Here we propose a scheme to generate a "hairline" solenoid with an extremely small size around 1 micrometer which is smaller than the typical coherence length in cold atoms. Correspondingly, interference effects will play a role in transport. Despite the small size, the magnetic flux imposed on the atoms is very large thanks to the very strong field generated inside the solenoid. By arranging different sets of Laguerre-Gauss (LG) lasers, the generation of Abelian and non-Abelian SU(2) lattice gauge fields is proposed for neutral atoms in ring- and square-shaped optical lattices. As an application, interference patterns of the magnetic type-I Aharonov-Bohm (AB) effect are obtained by evolving atoms along a circle over several tens of lattice cells. During the evolution, the quantum coherence is maintained and the atoms are exposed to a large magnetic flux. The scheme requires only standard optical access, and is robust to weak particle interactions.