Conical intersections in laboratory coordinates with ultracold molecules.

Abstract

For two states of opposite parity that cross as a function of an external magnetic field, the addition of an electric field will break the symmetry and induce an avoided crossing. A suitable arrangement of fields may be used to create a conical intersection as a function of external spatial coordinates. We consider the effect of the resulting geometric phase for ultracold polar molecules. For a Bose-Einstein condensate in the mean-field approximation, the geometric phase effect induces stable states of persistent superfluid flow that are characterized by half-integer quantized angular momentum.