No Arabic abstract
We investigate spin squeezing of a two-mode boson system with a Josephson coupling. An exact relation between the squeezing and the single-particle coherence at the maximal-squeezing time is discovered, which provides a more direct way to measure the squeezing by readout the coherence in atomic interference experiments. We prove explicitly that the strongest squeezing is along the $J_z$ axis, indicating the appearance of atom number-squeezed state. Power laws of the strongest squeezing and the optimal coupling with particle number $N$ are obtained based upon a wide range of numerical simulations.
We explore a new way of producing the Rashba spin-orbit coupling (SOC) for ultracold atoms by using a two-component (spinor) atomic Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) confined in a bilayer geometry. The SOC of the Rashba type is created if the atoms pick up a {pi} phase after completing a cyclic transition between four combined spin-layer states composed of two spin and two layer states. The cyclic coupling of the spin-layer states is carried out by combining an intralayer Raman coupling and an interlayer laser assisted tunneling. We theoretically determine the ground-state phases of the spin-orbit-coupled BEC for various strengths of the atom-atom interaction and the laser-assisted coupling. It is shown that the bilayer scheme provides a diverse ground-state phase diagram. In an intermediate range of the atom-light coupling two interlacing lattices of half- skyrmions and half-antiskyrmions are spontaneously created. In the strong-coupling regime, where the SOC of the Rashba-type is formed, the ground state represents plane-wave or standing-wave phases depending on the interaction between the atoms. A variational analysis is shown to be in a good agreement with the numerical results.
We propose and analyze a general mechanism of disorder-induced order in two-component Bose-Einstein condensates, analogous to corresponding effects established for XY spin models. We show that a random Raman coupling induces a relative phase of pi/2 between two BECs and that the effect is robust. We demonstrate it in 1D, 2D and 3D at T=0 and present evidence that it persists at small T>0. Applications to phase control in ultracold spinor condensates are discussed.
We measured the relative phase of two Bose-Einstein condensates confined in an radio frequency induced double well potential on an atom chip. We observed phase coherence between the separated condensates for times up to 200 ms after splitting, a factor of 10 beyond the phase diffusion limit expected for a coherent state in our experimental conditions (20 ms). The enhanced coherence time is attributed to number squeezing of the initial state by a factor of 10. In addition, we demonstrated a rotationally sensitive (Sagnac) geometry for a guided atom interferometer by propagating the split condensates.
The miscibility of two interacting quantum systems is an important testing ground for the understanding of complex quantum systems. Two-component Bose-Einstein condensates enable the investigation of this scenario in a particularly well controlled setting. In a homogeneous system, the transition between mixed and separated phases is fully characterised by a `miscibility parameter, based on the ratio of intra- to inter-species interaction strengths. Here we show, however, that this parameter is no longer the optimal one for trapped gases, for which the location of the phase boundary depends critically on atom numbers. We demonstrate how monitoring of damping rates and frequencies of dipole oscillations enables the experimental mapping of the phase diagram by numerical implementation of a fully self-consistent finite-temperature kinetic theory for binary condensates. The change in damping rate is explained in terms of surface oscillation in the immiscible regime, and counterflow instability in the miscible regime, with collisions becoming only important in the long time evolution.
We investigate the non-Abelian Josephson effect in spinor Bose-Einstein condensates with double optical traps. We propose, for the first time, a real physical system which contains non-Abelian Josephson effects. The collective modes of this weak coupling system have very different density and spin tunneling characters comparing to the Abelian case. We calculate the frequencies of the pseudo Goldstone modes in different phases between two traps respectively, which are a crucial feature of the non-Abelian Josephson effects. We also give an experimental protocol to observe this novel effect in future experiments.