No Arabic abstract
We present experimental results on a Bose gas in a quasi-2D geometry near the Berezinskii, Kosterlitz and Thouless (BKT) transition temperature. By measuring the density profile, textit{in situ} and after time of flight, and the coherence length, we identify different states of the gas. In particular, we observe that the gas develops a bimodal distribution without long range order. In this state, the gas presents a longer coherence length than the thermal cloud; it is quasi-condensed but is not superfluid. Experimental evidence indicates that we observe the superfluid transition (BKT transition).
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.
Bragg spectroscopy is used to measure excitations of a trapped, quantum-degenerate gas of 87Rb atoms in a 3-dimensional optical lattice. The measurements are carried out over a range of optical lattice depths in the superfluid phase of the Bose-Hubbard model. For fixed wavevector, the resonant frequency of the excitation is found to decrease with increasing lattice depth. A numerical calculation of the resonant frequencies based on Bogoliubov theory shows a less steep rate of decrease than the measurements.
We report the achievement of an optically guided and quasi-monomode atom laser, in all spin projection states ($m_F =$ -1, 0 and $+1$) of F=1 in Rubidium 87. The atom laser source is a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in a crossed dipole trap, purified to any one spin projection state by a spin-distillation process applied during the evaporation to BEC. The atom laser is outcoupled by an inhomogenous magnetic field, applied along the waveguide axis. The mean excitation number in the transverse modes is $<n > = 0.65 pm 0.05$ for $m_F = 0 $ and $<n > = 0.8 pm 0.3$ for the low field seeker $m_F = -1$.
We have observed the persistent flow of Bose-condensed atoms in a toroidal trap. The flow persists without decay for up to 10 s, limited only by experimental factors such as drift and trap lifetime. The quantized rotation was initiated by transferring one unit, $hbar$, of the orbital angular momentum from Laguerre-Gaussian photons to each atom. Stable flow was only possible when the trap was multiply-connected, and was observed with a BEC fraction as small as 15%. We also created flow with two units of angular momentum, and observed its splitting into two singly-charged vortices when the trap geometry was changed from multiply- to simply-connected.
We have measured the temperature dependence of the time of flight of helium excimer molecules He2* in superfluid 4He and find that the molecules behave ballistically below 100mK and exhibit Brownian motion above 200 mK. In the intermediate temperature range the transport cannot be described by either of the models.