2020/01/28 by Vincent Lienhard, Pascal Scholl, Sebastian Weber +8 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #quant-ph #cond-mat.quant-gas #physics.atom-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevx.10.021031
published as Phys. Rev. X 10, 021031 (2020) · 10 pages, 7 figures
arxiv created 2020/01/28 · arxiv updated 2020/05/11
We experimentally realize a Peierls phase in the hopping amplitude of excitations carried by Rydberg atoms, and observe the resulting characteristic chiral motion in a minimal setup of three sites. Our demonstration relies on the intrinsic spin-orbit coupling of the dipolar exchange interaction combined with time-reversal symmetry breaking by a homogeneous external magnetic field. Remarkably, the phase of the hopping amplitude between two sites strongly depends on the occupancy of the third site, thus leading to a correlated hopping associated to a density-dependent Peierls phase. We experimentally observe this density-dependent hopping and show that the excitations behave as anyonic particles with a non-trivial phase under exchange. Finally, we confirm the dependence of the Peierls phase on the geometrical arrangement of the Rydberg atoms.