Landau Levels in Strained Optical Lattices

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to create pseudo-magnetic fields in strained optical lattices, leading to Landau levels observable through various experimental techniques, enabling new studies of quantum phenomena with cold atoms.

Contribution

It introduces a static optical lattice setup that simulates pseudo-magnetic fields and Landau levels, avoiding heating issues of previous dynamic methods.

Findings

Pseudo-magnetic fields induce Landau levels in optical lattices.

Experimental signatures include Bragg spectroscopy and cyclotron motion.

The setup is compatible with existing experiments.

Abstract

We propose a hexagonal optical lattice system with spatial variations in the hopping matrix elements. Just like in the valley Hall effect in strained Graphene, for atoms near the Dirac points the variations in the hopping matrix elements can be described by a pseudo-magnetic field and result in the formation of Landau levels. We show that the pseudo-magnetic field leads to measurable experimental signatures in momentum resolved Bragg spectroscopy, Bloch oscillations, cyclotron motion, and quantization of in-situ densities. Our proposal can be realized by a slight modification of existing experiments. In contrast to previous methods, pseudo-magnetic fields are realized in a completely static system avoiding common heating effects and therefore opening the door to studying interaction effects in Landau levels with cold atoms.