We discuss a Casimir force due to zero-temperature quantum fluctuations in a weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with a strong harmonic trap. The results show that the presence of a strong harmonic trap changes the power law behavior of Casimir force due to the dimensional reduction effect. At finite temperature, we calculate Casimir force due to thermal fluctuation and find an exotic temperature dependent behavior in the first order term. Finally, we speculate some possible experimental realization and detection of the force in future experiments.
We use the extended Lifshitz theory to study the behaviors of the Casimir forces between finite-thickness effective medium slabs. We first study the interaction between a semi-infinite Drude metal and a finite-thickness magnetic slab with or without substrate. For no substrate, the large distance $d$ dependence of the force is repulsive and goes as $1/d^5$; for the Drude metal substrate, a stable equilibrium point appears at an intermediate distance which can be tuned by the thickness of the slab. We then study the interaction between two identical chiral metamaterial slabs with and without substrate. For no substrate, the finite thickness of the slabs $D$ does not influence significantly the repulsive character of the force at short distances, while the attractive character at large distances becomes weaker and behaves as $1/d^6$; for the Drude metal substrate, the finite thickness of the slabs $D$ does not influence the repulsive force too much at short distances until $D=0.05lambda_0$.
We simulate a trapped quasi-two-dimensional Bose gas using a classical field method. To interpret our results we identify the uniform Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) temperature $T_{BKT}$ as where the system phase space density satisfies a critical value. We observe that density fluctuations are suppressed in the system well above $T_{BKT}$ when a quasi-condensate forms as the first occurrence of degeneracy. At lower temperatures, but still above $T_{BKT}$, we observe the development of appreciable coherence as a prominent finite-size effect, which manifests as bimodality in the momentum distribution of the system. At $T_{BKT}$ algebraic decay of off-diagonal correlations occurs near the trap center with an exponent of 0.25, as expected for the uniform system. Our results characterize the low temperature phase diagram for a trapped quasi-2D Bose gas and are consistent with observations made in recent experiments.
A neutral impurity atom immersed in a dilute Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) can have a bound ground state in which the impurity is self-localized. In this small polaron-like state, the impurity distorts the density of the surrounding BEC, thereby creating the self-trapping potential minimum. We describe the self-localization in a strong coupling approach.
We investigate the harmonically trapped interacting Bose gas in a quasi-2D geometry using the classical field method. The system exhibits quasi-long-range order and non-classical rotational inertia at temperatures below the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless cross-over to the superfluid state. In particular, we compute the scissors-mode oscillation frequencies and find that the irrotational mode changes its frequency as the temperature is sweeped across the cross-over thus providing microscopic evidence for the emergence of superfluidity.
We provide an in depth analysis of the theory proposed by Holzmann, Chevallier and Krauth (HCK) [Europhys. Lett., {bf 82}, 30001 (2008)] for predicting the temperature at which the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transition to a superfluid state occurs in the harmonically trapped quasi-two-dimensional (2D) Bose gas. Their theory is based on a meanfield model of the system density and we show that the HCK predictions change appreciably when an improved meanfield theory and identification of the transition point is used. In this analysis we develop a consistent theory that provides a lower bound for the BKT transition temperature in the trapped quasi-2D Bose gas.