Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Jiménez-García, K
• Compton, R. L
• Phillips, W. D
• Porto, J. V
• Spielman, I. B
• Lin, Y-J

Titel

A synthetic electric force acting on neutral atoms

Ist Teil von

• Nature physics, 2011-07, Vol.7 (7), p.531-534

Ort / Verlag

London: Nature Publishing Group

Erscheinungsjahr

2011

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Electromagnetism is a simple example of a gauge theory where the underlying potentials (the vector and scalar potentials) are defined only up to a gauge choice. The vector potential generates magnetic fields through its spatial variation and electric fields through its time dependence. Here, we report experiments in which we have produced a synthetic gauge field. The gauge field emerges only at low energy in a rubidium Bose-Einstein condensate: the neutral atoms behave as charged particles do in the presence of a homogeneous effective vector potential. We have generated a synthetic electric field through the time dependence of an effective vector potential, a physical consequence that emerges even though the vector potential is spatially uniform.