Synthetic flux attachment

Abstract

Topological field theories emerge at low energy in strongly correlated condensed matter systems and appear in the context of planar gravity. In particular, the study of Chern-Simons terms gives rise to the concept of flux attachment when the gauge field is coupled to matter, yielding flux-charge composites. We investigate the generation of flux attachment in a Bose-Einstein condensate in the presence of nonlinear synthetic gauge potentials. In doing so, we identify the U(1) Chern-Simons gauge field as a singular density-dependent gauge potential, which in turn can be expressed as a Berry connection. We envisage a proof-of-concept scheme where the artificial gauge field is perturbatively induced by an effective light-matter detuning created by interparticle interactions. At a mean field level, we recover the action of a “charged” superfluid minimally coupled to both a background and a Chern-Simons gauge field. Remarkably, a localized density perturbation in combination with a nonlinear gauge potential gives rise to an effective composite boson model of fractional quantum Hall effect, displaying anyonic vortices.