No Arabic abstract
In a recent experiment Paoletti et al (Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 154501, 2008) monitored the motion of tracer particles in turbulent superfluid helium and inferred that the velocity components do not obey the Gaussian statistics observed in ordinary turbulence. Motivated by their experiment, we create a small turbulent state in an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate, which enables us to compute directly the velocity field, and we find similar non-classical power-law tails. Our result thus suggests that non-Gaussian turbulent velocity statistics describe a fundamental property of quantum fluids. We also track the decay of the vortex tangle in the presence of the thermal cloud.
Improved control of the motional and internal quantum states of ultracold neutral atoms and ions has opened intriguing possibilities for quantum simulation and quantum computation. Many-body effects have been explored with hundreds of thousands of quantum-degenerate neutral atoms and coherent light-matter interfaces have been built. Systems of single or a few trapped ions have been used to demonstrate universal quantum computing algorithms and to detect variations of fundamental constants in precision atomic clocks. Until now, atomic quantum gases and single trapped ions have been treated separately in experiments. Here we investigate whether they can be advantageously combined into one hybrid system, by exploring the immersion of a single trapped ion into a Bose-Einstein condensate of neutral atoms. We demonstrate independent control over the two components within the hybrid system, study the fundamental interaction processes and observe sympathetic cooling of the single ion by the condensate. Our experiment calls for further research into the possibility of using this technique for the continuous cooling of quantum computers. We also anticipate that it will lead to explorations of entanglement in hybrid quantum systems and to fundamental studies of the decoherence of a single, locally controlled impurity particle coupled to a quantum environment.
We find a novel topological defect in a spin-nematic superfluid theoretically. A quantized vortex spontaneously breaks its axisymmetry, leading to an elliptic vortex in nematic-spin Bose-Einstein condensates with small positive quadratic Zeeman effect. The new vortex is considered the Joukowski transform of a conventional vortex. Its oblateness grows when the Zeeman length exceeds the spin healing length. This structure is sustained by balancing the hydrodynamic potential and the elasticity of a soliton connecting two spin spots, which are observable by in situ magnetization imaging. The theoretical analysis clearly defines the difference between half quantum vortices of the polar and antiferromagnetic phases in spin-1 condensates.
We study the dynamics of an impurity embedded in a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate (Bose polaron), by recalling the quantum Brownian motion model. It is crucial that the model considers a parabolic trapping potential to resemble the experimental conditions. Thus, we detail here how the formal derivation changes due to the gas trap, in comparison to the homogeneous gas. We first find that the presence of a gas trap leads to a new form of the bath-impurity coupling constant and a larger degree in the super-ohmicity of the spectral density. This is manifested as a different dependence of the system dynamics on the past history. To quantify this, we introduce several techniques to compare the different amount of memory effects arising in the homogeneous and inhomogeneous gas. We find that it is higher in the second case. Moreover, we calculate the position variance of the impurity, represenitng a measurable quantity. We show that the impurity experiences super-diffusion and genuine position squeezing. Wdetail how both effects can be enhanced or inhibited by tuning the Bose-Einstein condensate trap frequency.
Solid state quantum condensates can differ from other condensates, such as Helium, ultracold atomic gases, and superconductors, in that the condensing quasiparticles have relatively short lifetimes, and so, as for lasers, external pumping is required to maintain a steady state. In this chapter we present a non-equilibrium path integral approach to condensation in a dissipative environment and apply it to microcavity polaritons, driven out of equilibrium by coupling to multiple baths, describing pumping and decay. Using this, we discuss the relation between non-equilibrium polariton condensation, lasing, and equilibrium condensation.
We have studied the decay of a Bose-Einstein condensate of metastable helium atoms in an optical dipole trap. In the regime where two- and three-body losses can be neglected we show that the Bose-Einstein condensate and the thermal cloud show fundamentally different decay characteristics. The total number of atoms decays exponentially with time constant tau; however, the thermal cloud decays exponentially with time constant (4/3)tau and the condensate decays much faster, and non-exponentially. We show that this behaviour, which should be present for all BECs in thermal equilibrium with a considerable thermal fraction, is due to a transfer of atoms from the condensate to the thermal cloud during its decay.