Controlling and probing non-abelian emergent gauge potentials in spinor Bose-Fermi mixtures.
Gauge fields, typified by the electromagnetic field, often appear as emergent phenomena due to geometrical properties of a curved Hilbert subspace, and provide a key mechanism for understanding such exotic phenomena as the anomalous and topological Hall effects. Non-abelian gauge potentials serve as a source of non-singular magnetic monopoles. Here we show that unlike conventional solid materials, the non-abelianness of emergent gauge potentials in spinor Bose-Fermi atomic mixtures can be continuously varied by changing the relative particle-number densities of bosons and fermions. The non-abelian feature is captured by an explicit dependence of the measurable spin current density of fermions in the mixture on the variable coupling constant. Spinor mixtures also provide us with a method to coherently and spontaneously generate a pure spin current without relying on the spin Hall effect. Such a spin current is expected to have potential applications in the new generation of atomtronic devices.
RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS), Wako, Saitama 351-0198, Japan.
Nguyen Thanh
NT
Phuc
RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS), Wako, Saitama 351-0198, Japan.
Gen
G
Tatara
Department of Applied Physics, University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan.
Yuki
Y
Kawaguchi
RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS), Wako, Saitama 351-0198, Japan.|Department of Physics, University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan.
Masahito
M
Ueda