Berry, but not Abel, in a spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensate

by Jonas Larson (Nordita)

Friday 12 Dec 2008, 13:15 → 14:15 Europe/Stockholm

122:026

Lately, several proposals for generating non-abelian gauge fields in cold atom systems have been presented. Several of these ideas originate from the studies of conical intersections among electronic potentials in molecules. By representing the Hamiltonian in an adiabatic representation, such non-abelian gauge fields naturally arise. Applying the same approach to cold atoms moving in spatially dependent laser fields gives rise to the same phenomena. In this talk, I will briefly summarize the concepts of conical intersections, gauge fields, and geometrical phases as they occur in molecular systems. I then proceed by showing that such model systems can indeed be achieved in a trapped spinor Bose-Einstein condensate. The resulting Hamiltonian is equivalent to the Exe one (however, with momentum and position interchanged). I will in particular show the effect of non-zero geometrical phases and how these may be detected. Noteworthy is that analogous models are also found in for example graphene and other condensed matter systems.