*ITAMP Topical Lunch Discussion* Date: Friday, March 6th Time: 12:00-1:30 pm Pizza will be served. Location: B-106 @ Center for Astrophysics (60 Garden Street) Directions: after entering the lobby of the CfA, turn right to enter the hallway of the B building. In the hallway, turn right again, and B-106 is there. *Speaker: *Colin Kennedy (graduate student in Ketterle group) *Title:* Bose-Einstein Condensation in the 1/2 Flux Harper Hamiltonian *Abstract:* In condensed matter physics, two-dimensional electron gases subjected to strong magnetic fields have proved to be a powerful platform for investigating topological phases of matter such as the quantum Hall effect and the fractional quantum Hall effect. Recently, much progress has been made in simulating such systems using ultracold neutral atoms utilizing Raman processes in bulk BEC's and Fermi gases and modulation techniques in optical lattices. We report on our work in realizing a system exhibiting arbitrarily high synthetic magnetic fields in optical lattices and in achieving Bose-Einstein condensation in a model with effective magnetic fields of 1/2 flux per plaquette. We study how coherence emerges and decays in our weakly interacting effective Hamiltonian with preference given to finding an adiabatic pathway for adding strong interactions. Our work serves as an important starting point for practical approaches to investigate the quantum Hall effect, the quantum spin Hall effect, Weyl points, and other exotic states of matter in optical lattices. -- Dr. Swati Singh Institute for Theoretical Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (ITAMP), Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, MS-14, Cambridge, MA 02138 https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~ssingh/