Berry, but not Abel, in a spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensate
Nordita seminar
Friday 12 December 2008
from 13:15
to 14:15 at
122:026
Speaker :
Jonas Larson (Nordita)
Abstract :
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.
