Realistic Rashba and Dressehaus spin-orbit coupling for neutral atoms

Understand

We describe a new class of atom-laser coupling schemes which lead to spin-orbit coupled Hamiltonians for ultra-cold neutral atoms.

• By properly setting the optical phases, a pair of degenerate pseudospin states emerge as the lowest energy states in the spectrum, and are thus immune to collisionally induced decay.
• These schemes use $N$ cyclically coupled ground or metastable internal states.
• We specialize to two situations: a three level case giving fixed Rashba coupling, and a four-level case that adds a controllable Dresselhaus contribution.