Realistic time-reversal invariant topological insulators with neutral atoms

We lay out an experiment to realize time-reversal invariant topological insulators in alkali atomic gases. We introduce an original method to synthesize a gauge field in the near field of an atom chip, which effectively mimics the effects of spin-orbit coupling and produces quantum spin-Hall states....

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Goldman, N., Satija, I., Nikolic, P., Bermúdez Carballo, Alejandro, Martín-Delgado Alcántara, Miguel Ángel, Lewenstein, M., Spielman, I.B.
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2010
País:España
Institución:Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)
Repositorio:Docta Complutense
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:docta.ucm.es:20.500.14352/42827
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/42827
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:53
Magnetic-fields.
Física-Modelos matemáticos
Descripción
Sumario:We lay out an experiment to realize time-reversal invariant topological insulators in alkali atomic gases. We introduce an original method to synthesize a gauge field in the near field of an atom chip, which effectively mimics the effects of spin-orbit coupling and produces quantum spin-Hall states.We also propose a feasible scheme to engineer sharp boundaries where the hallmark edge states are localized. Our multiband system has a large parameter space exhibiting a variety of quantum phase transitions between topological and normal insulating phases. Because of their remarkable versatility, cold-atom systems are ideally suited to realize topological states of matter and drive the development of topological quantum computing.