Spinor BEC in Triangular Optical Lattices

In this paper the authors present the first experiments loading a Bose-Einstein condensate into a triangular optical lattice. The lattice is formed by three interfering laser beams intersecting at a relative angle of 120deg in one plane in addition to one retroreflected beam perpendicular to this plane. Depending on the strength of this last beam, the lattice potential can be tuned from a triangular lattice of Id tubes to a Id stack of 2d triangular lattice sheets. As an interesting aspect, the triangular lattice can be transformed into a "magnetic" hexagonal one with sublattices for the different spin orientations, just by rotating the laser polarization.