Synthetic magnetic fields for cold erbium atoms

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to generate strong, homogeneous synthetic magnetic fields for ultracold erbium atoms using phase imprinting with optical Raman beams, facilitating exploration of fractional quantum Hall effects.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical scheme for creating artificial gauge fields in erbium atoms, leveraging their unique properties to reduce heating and enable quantum Hall experiments.

Findings

Predicted strong synthetic magnetic fields with good spatial homogeneity.

Estimated the Laughlin gap size for erbium atomic ensembles.

Identified erbium as a promising candidate for fractional quantum Hall studies.

Abstract

The implementation of the fractional quantum Hall effect in ultracold atomic quantum gases remains, despite substantial advances in the field, a major challenge. Since atoms are electrically neutral, a key ingredient is the generation of sufficiently strong artificial gauge fields. Here we theoretically investigate the synthetization of such fields for bosonic erbium atoms by phase imprinting with two counterpropagating optical Raman beams. Given the nonvanishing orbital angular momentum of the rare-earth atomic species erbium in the electronic ground state and the availability of narrow-line transitions, heating from photon scattering is expected to be lower than in atomic alkali-metal species. We give a parameter regime for which strong synthetic magnetic fields with good spatial homogeneity are predicted. We also estimate the size of the Laughlin gap expected from the s-wave contribution of the interactions for typical experimental parameters of a two-dimensional atomic erbium microcloud. Our analysis shows that cold rare-earth atomic ensembles are highly attractive candidate systems for experimental explorations of the fractional quantum Hall regime.