Experimental Realization of Strong Effective Magnetic Fields in an Optical Lattice

Ultracold atoms in an optical lattice are promising candidates to study quantum many-body phenomena, such as the integer or fractional quantum Hall effect. Here we report about the experimental realization of strong effective magnetic fields with ultracold atoms using Raman assisted tunneling in an optical superlattice. We studied the nature of the frustrated ground state in the presence of an effective staggered magnetic field from its momentum distribution and directly revealed the quantum cyclotron orbit of a single atom exposed to the magnetic field.