Emergent gravity and gravitational lensing in quantum materials

Abstract: We show that an effective gravitational field naturally emerges in quantum materials with long-wavelength spin (or pseudospin) textures. When the itinerant electrons' spin strongly couples to the background spin texture, it effectively behaves as a spinless particle in a curved space, with the curvature arising from quantum corrections to the electron's spin orientation. The emergent gravity gives rise to the electron lensing effect, an analog of the gravitational lensing. Our work shows that novel ``gravitational'' phenomena generically appear in quantum systems due to nonadiabaticity, opening new research directions in quantum physics.