Atomic Physics Seminar: Judith Hoeller, Yale University, “Topological Bloch oscillations”

Event time: 
Tuesday, September 18, 2018 - 3:30pm to 4:30pm
Location: 
Sloane Physics Laboratory (SPL), Room 56 See map
217 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

Recently, a cold-atomic experiment [1] has measured a prolonged Bloch oscillation when loading an ultracold gas of rubidium atoms into a honeycomb optical lattice, and uniformly accelerating the lattice. Bloch oscillation is one of the first-studied quantum phenomena in solids, relying on an energy gap as well as the translational symmetry of solids, and has fundamental period that is inversely proportional to the lattice translational period. We [2] introduce a type of Bloch oscillation that additionally relies on point-group symmetries, and occurs with a period that is an integer multiple of the fundamental period. This integer is a topological invariant. The prolonged Bloch oscillation measured in [1] is not topological; however, we explain how topological Bloch oscillations can be measured using the same experimental setup as [1].

[1] T. Li et al., Science 352, 1094 (2016)
[2] J. Hoeller, A. Alexandradinata, Phys. Rev. B 98, 024310 (2018)

Host: Nir Navon