I will briefly review some recent developments on how to achieve
and manipulate effective gauge fields for ultracold atoms. Starting with
some historical remarks on effective gauge theories in molecular and
time-dependent systems, I move on to show how this translates to ultracold
atoms exposed to spatially varying laser fields. This research has gained
great attention lately, and the experimental efforts are seriously beginning
to pay off. At the present, the non-Abelian case has not been experimentally
demonstrated but will in the near future... An important example of a
non-Abelian gauge potential is the one of Rashba, which for a particular
choice of atom-laser configuration can be constructed in these systems. This
opens the door for sudies of effects such as, spin Hall currents,
relativistic Zitterbewegung, half quantized vortices. Combined with optical
lattices, there's even hope to explore quantized Hall physics
and interesting physics that comes with it.