Synthetic Gauge Field with Highly Magnetic Lanthanide Atoms

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to generate strong synthetic magnetic fields and spin-orbit coupling in highly magnetic lanthanide atoms like dysprosium, enabling exploration of exotic quantum phases with reduced heating.

Contribution

It introduces a scheme using lanthanide atoms for enhanced synthetic gauge fields and reveals a new phase transition and a novel Majorana spinor helix structure in high-spin condensates.

Findings

Synthetic magnetic fields an order of magnitude larger than alkalis.

Reduced heating rate for the same Raman coupling.

Discovery of a phase transition in dressed states.

Abstract

We present a scheme for generating a synthetic magnetic field and spin-orbit coupling via Raman coupling in highly magnetic lanthanide atoms such as dysprosium. Employing these atoms offer several advantages for realizing strongly correlated states and exotic spinor phases. The large spin and narrow optical transitions of these atoms allow the generation of synthetic magnetic fields an order of magnitude larger than those in the alkalis, but with considerable reduction of the heating rate for equal Raman coupling. The effective hamiltonian of these systems differs from that of the alkalis' by an additional nematic coupling term, which leads to a phase transition in the dressed states as detuning varies. For \text{high-spin} condensates, spin-orbit coupling leads to a spatially periodic structure, which is described in Majorana representation by a set of points moving periodically on a unit sphere. We name this a "Majorana spinor helix" in analogy to the persistent spin-1/2 helix observed in electronic systems.