中央研究院 原子與分子科學研究所

P.-K. Chen, L.-R. Liu, M.-J. Tsai1, N.-C. Chiu1, Y. Kawaguchi, S.-K. Yip, M.-S. Chang, and Y.-J. Lin*

Physical Review Letters 121, 250401 (2018).

We realize synthetic azimuthal gauge potentials for Bose-Einstein condensates along with spin-orbital-angular-momentum coupling. This is achieved by engineering atom-light interactions. We characterize the spin textures of the atoms and exploit the azimuthal gauge potential to demonstrate the Hess-Fairbank effect, the analogue of Meissner effect in superconductors. Our demonstration serves as a paradigm to create topological excitations by tailoring atom-light interactions where both types of SO(3) vortices in the     manifold, coreless vortices and polar-core vortices, are created in our experiment. The gauge field in the stationary Hamiltonian opens a path to investigating rotation properties of atomic superfluids under thermal equilibrium.