With exciton lifetime much extended in semiconductor quantum-well structures, their transport and Bose-Einstein condensation become a focus of research in recent years. We reveal a momentum-space gauge field in the exciton center-of-mass dynamics due to Berry phase effects. We predict spin-dependent topological transport of the excitons analogous to the anomalous Hall and Nernst effects for electrons. We also predict spin-dependent circulation of a trapped exciton gas and instability in an exciton condensate in favor of vortex formation.
Recently Javanainen and Wilkens [Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 4675 (1997)] have analysed an experiment in which an interacting Bose condensate, after being allowed to form in a single potential well, is cut by splitting the well adiabatically with a very high potential barrier, and estimate the rate at which, following the cut, the two halves of the condensate lose the memory of their relative phase. We argue that, by neglecting the effect of interactions in the initial state before the separation, they have overestimated the rate of phase randomization by a numerical factor which grows with the interaction strength and with the slowness of the separation process.
We report on the observation of the Pancharatnam-Berry phase in a condensate of indirect excitons (IXs) in a GaAs coupled quantum well structure. The Pancharatnam-Berry phase leads to phase shifts of interference fringes in IX interference patterns. Correlations are found between the phase shifts, polarization pattern of IX emission, and onset of IX spontaneous coherence. The Pancharatnam-Berry phase is acquired due to coherent spin precession in IX condensate. The effect of the Pancharatnam-Berry phase on the IX phase pattern is described in terms of an associated momentum.
A hydrodynamic description is used to study the zero-temperature properties of a trapped spinor Bose-Einstein condensate in the presence of a uniform magnetic field. We show that, in the case of antiferromagnetic spin-spin interaction, the polar and ferromagnetic configurations of the ground state can coexist in the trap. These two phases are spatially segregated in such a way that the polar state occupies the inner part while the ferromagnetic state occupies the outer part of the atomic cloud. We also derive a set of coupled hydrodynamic equations for the number density and spin density excitations of the system. It is shown that these equations can be analytically solved for the system in an isotropic harmonic trap and a constant magnetic field. Remarkably, the related low lying excitation spectra are completely determined by the solutions in the region occupied by the polar state. We find that, within the Thomas-Fermi approximation, the presence of a constant magnetic field does not change the excitation spectra which still possess the similar form of that obtained by Stringari.
We report on the formation of ultra-cold Na$_2$ molecules using single-photon photoassociation of a Bose-Einstein condensate. The photoassociation rate, linewidth and light shift of the J=1, $v=135$ vibrational level of the mterm{A}{1}{+}{u} molecular bound state have been measured. We find that the photoassociation rate constant increases linearly with intensity, even where it is predicted that many-body effects might limit the rate. Our observations are everywhere in good agreement with a two-body theory having no free parameters.
We explore the formation and collective modes of Bose-Einstein condensate of Dirac magnons (Dirac BEC). While we focus on two-dimensional Dirac magnons, an employed approach is general and could be used to describe Bose-Einstein condensates with linear quasiparticle spectrum in various systems. By using a phenomenological multicomponent model of pumped boson population together with bosons residing at Dirac nodes, the formation and time evolution of condensates of Dirac bosons is investigated. The condensate coherence and its multicomponent nature are manifested in the Rabi oscillations whose period is determined by the gap in the spin-wave spectrum. A Dirac nature of the condensates could be also probed by the spectrum of collective modes. It is shown that the Haldane gap provides an efficient means to tune between the gapped and gapless collective modes as well as controls their stability.