Bloch-Zener oscillations in a tunable optical honeycomb lattice
- Institute for Quantum Electronics, ETH Zurich, 8093 Zurich (Switzerland)
- Institute for Quantum Electronics, ETH Zurich, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland and LP2N, Universite Bordeaux 1, IOGS, CNRS, 351 cours de la Liberation, 33405 Talence (France)
Ultracold gases in optical lattices have proved to be a flexible tool to simulate many different phenomena of solid state physics [1, 2]. Recently, optical lattices with complex geometries have been realized [3, 4, 5, 6, 7], paving the way to simulating more realistic systems. The honeycomb structure has recently become accessible in an optical lattice composed of mutually perpendicular laser beams. This lattice structure exhibits topological features in its band structure – the Dirac points. At these points, two energy bands intersect linearly and the particles behave as relativistic Dirac fermions. In optical lattices, Bloch oscillations [8] resolved both in time and in quasi-momentum space can be directly observed. We make use of such Bloch-Zener oscillations to probe the vanishing energy gap at the Dirac points as well as their position in the band structure. In small band gap regions, we observe Landau-Zener tunneling [7, 9] to the second band and the regions of maximum transfer can be identified with the position of the Dirac points.
- OSTI ID:
- 22261927
- Journal Information:
- AIP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 1566, Issue 1; Conference: ICPS 2012: 31. international conference on the physics of semiconductors, Zurich (Switzerland), 29 Jul - 3 Aug 2012; Other Information: (c) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0094-243X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Evolution of Bloch-mode envelopes in two-dimensional generalized honeycomb lattices
Atomic Bloch-Zener oscillations for sensitive force measurements in a cavity