*********************************
There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
*********************************
Here I present our experimental work synthesizing static gauge fields for ultracold neutral atoms (bosonic and fermionic alkali atoms). I will discuss this gauge field in the language of spin-orbit coupling where it consists of an equal sum of Rashba and Dresselhaus couplings. In experiment, we couple two internal states of our alkali atoms with a pair of ``Raman'' lasers and load our degenerate quantum gas into the resulting adiabatic eigenstates.
For a Bose gas, a function of the Raman laser strength, a new exchange-driven interaction between the two dressed spins develops, which drives a (quantum) phase transition from a state where the two dressed spin states spatially mix, to one where they phase separate. Going beyond this simple modification to the spin-dependent interaction, we show that in the limit of large laser intensity, the particles act as free atoms, but interact with contributions from higher even partial waves.
