Princeton University Department of Physics Colloquium

I will present our experimental work on Bose-Einstein condensates, systems of ultra-cold charge neutral atoms at a temperature of about 100 nano-Kelvin: one billion times colder than room temperature. These condensate—quantum gases—are nearly perfect quantum mechanical systems, and here we will demonstrate a technique by which these charge neutral particles are subject to effective (although static) gauge fields: vector potentials. These vector potentials can be vectors of real numbers like the electromagnetic vector potential (with which we engineer synthetic electric and magnetic fields for our neutral atoms), or of matrices (creating artificial spin-orbit coupling).