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Magnetism plays a key role in modern science and technology, but still many open questions arise from the interplay of magnetic many-body interactions. Deeper insight into complex magnetic behaviour and the nature of magnetic phase transitions can be obtained from, for example, model systems of coupled XY and Ising spins. Here, we report on the experimental realization of such a coupled system with ultracold atoms in triangular optical lattices. This is accomplished by imposing an artificial gauge field on the neutral atoms, which acts on them as a magnetic field does on charged particles. As a result, the atoms show persistent circular currents, the direction of which provides an Ising variable. On this, the tunable staggered gauge field, generated by a periodic driving of the lattice, acts as a longitudinal field. Further, the superfluid ground state presents strong analogies with the paradigm example of the fully frustrated XY model on a triangular lattice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a universal method to create a tunable, artificial vector gauge potential for neutral particles trapped in an optical lattice. The necessary Peierls phase of the hopping parameters between neighboring lattice sites is generated by applying a suitable periodic inertial force such that the method does not rely on any internal structure of the particles. We experimentally demonstrate the realization of such artificial potentials, which generate ground-state superfluids at arbitrary nonzero quasimomentum. We furthermore investigate possible implementations of this scheme to create tunable magnetic fluxes, going towards model systems for strong-field physics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]