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Novel Orbital Physics with Cold Atoms in Optical Lattices Congjun Wu, University of California-San Diego, DMR 0804775. Quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) states in optical lattices.
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Novel Orbital Physics with Cold Atoms in Optical LatticesCongjun Wu, University of California-San Diego, DMR 0804775 • Quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) states in optical lattices. • Among various Hall effects, including classic and quantum, charge and spin, QAH is the only one which has not been observed yet in both condensed matter and cold atom systems. • We propose to realize the QAH state in the p-orbital band of the honeycomb optical lattices by using the available experiment technique of the on-site rotation developed by Gemelke et al. The system naturally reduces to the celebrated QAH Haldane model. • Unconventional BEC with synthetic spin-orbit coupling. • The current study of superfluid state of bosons is largely within the paradigm of the no-node theorem which states that the ground state wavefunction of bosons are positive-definite. • We find that the BECs of bosons with synthetic spin-orbit coupling is a new state of matter beyond this paradigm, which exhibit complex-valued wavefunction, and thus break time-reversal symmetry spontaneously.
Activities of the project “orbital physics with cold atoms”Congjun Wu, University of California-San Diego, DMR 0804775 • Education: • Classroom teaching: parts of the project results are incorporated into the teaching of quantum mechanics and solid state physics courses. The symmetry principle and topology analysis are emphasized. • Guiding students and postdocs at UCSD: Hsiang-hsuan Hung, Yi Li, and Hubert Nguyen (Ph. D. students), and Wei-Cheng Lee (Postdoctoral researcher). • Outreach: • Lecture to high school students “Superfluidity, superconductivity, and Bose-Einstein condensation”. • Presentations: • Many invited talks at prestigious universities, research institutes, conferences including Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Cold Atom Meeting; Exotic insulator workshop at Johns Hopkins; UC Santa Crutz; Physics Colloquium at Washington State University; Topological insulator workshop at Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, etc.