Hannover 2010 – scientific programme
Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Downloads | Help
A: Fachverband Atomphysik
A 5: Ultra-Cold Atoms: Rydberg Gases / Miscellaneous (with Q)
A 5.9: Talk
Monday, March 8, 2010, 18:45–19:00, A 320
Connecting ultra hot with ultra cold: geometric phases in cold atoms — •Michael Merkl1, Patrik Öhberg1, Luis Santos2, and Gediminas Juzeliunas3 — 1Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh — 2Universität Hannover — 3Vilnius University
Ultra-cold atoms have turned out to be an ideal playground for testing quantum physics. Recently analogies between ultra-cold systems and high energy physics have attracted a great interest. For kinetic energies below the photon recoil limit, the internal electronic states can be said to follow the optical field and hence a Berry phase emerges in the atom’s centre of mass Schrödinger equation. Moreover, for a degenerate manifold of electronic states the geometric phase describes transitions within this pseudo-spin Hilbert space, which can also give rise to non-Abelian effects. In this work we show how a wide range of phenomena like Josephson effects, mass currents and soliton like objects in the presence of geometric gauge potentials can occur. These techniques can also be used to mimic aspects of relativistic quantum mechanics with cold atoms.