2002/04/05 by Janne Ruostekoski, Gerald V. Dunne, Juha Javanainen · 6 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Condensed matter physics #Electron #Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope #Fermi gas #Fractionalization #Lattice (music) #Magnetic field #Optical lattice #Physics #Quantum Mechanics and Non-Hermitian Physics #Quantum chaos and dynamical systems #Quantum mechanics #Quasiparticle #Superconductivity #cond-mat #hep-th #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.88.180401
published as Phys.Rev.Lett. 88 (2002) 180401 · 4 pp, 1 figure; to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett
arxiv created 2002/04/05 · openalex publication_date 2002/04/17 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We show that a dilute two-species gas of Fermi-Dirac alkali-metal atoms in a periodic optical lattice may exhibit fractionalization of the particle number when the two components are coupled via a coherent electromagnetic field with a topologically nontrivial phase profile. This results in fractional eigenvalues of the spin operator with vanishing fluctuations. The fractional part can be accurately controlled by modifying the effective detuning of the electromagnetic field.