Colloquium: Dr. Tigran A. Sedrakyan
Exotic Quantum States of Spin-Orbit Coupled Bosons
The recently discovered spin-orbit coupled boson systems are remarkable for their capacity to explore physics that may not be revealed in any other way. The spin-orbit couplings, which can be artificially engineered in cold-atom experiments, in many instances leads to single-particle dispersion relations exhibiting multiple minima or even degenerate manifold of minimal energy states. It is entirely the effect of collisions (i.e. boson-boson interactions) which lifts this degeneracy and leads to an amazing variety of completely new quantum many-body states. This talk describes a theoretical discovery of a novel phase of matter, where, at low densities, bosons essentially redress themselves and behave as fermions. This state is a composite fermion state with a Chern-Simons gauge field and filling factor one.