In this talk I will review recent progresses in studying spin-orbit coupling in ultracold quantum gases. I will discuss several examples of new quantum states and phenomena when spin-orbit coupling is introduced to ultracold atomic gases, which include a novel type of superfluid phase in a Bose gas with stripe order due to the single particle ground state degeneracy and an intriguing finite temperature phase diagram, and novel fermion pairing structure of a resonantly interacting Fermi gas. I will also discuss great challenges in this direction due to heating problem, and I will present a way to overcome the difficulty by utilizing highly magnetic lanthanide atoms.

个人简介:

Prof. Zhai received his Ph.D from Institute for Advanced Study of Tsinghua University in 2005. Then he was postdoctoral fellow in Ohio-State University from 2005-2007 and in University of California at Berkeley from 2007-2009. He returned to Institute for Advanced Study of Tsinghua University as a Member in 2009 and became a tenured Member in 2012. His research mainly focuses on theory of ultracold quantum gases.