No Arabic abstract
We describe our experimental setup for creating stable Bose-Einstein condensates of Rb-85 with tunable interparticle interactions. We use sympathetic cooling with Rb-87 in two stages, initially in a tight Ioffe-Pritchard magnetic trap and subsequently in a weak, large-volume crossed optical dipole trap, using the 155 G Feshbach resonance to manipulate the elastic and inelastic scattering properties of the Rb-85 atoms. Typical Rb-85 condensates contain 4 x 10^4 atoms with a scattering length of a=+200a_0. Our minimalist apparatus is well-suited to experiments on dual-species and spinor Rb condensates, and has several simplifications over the Rb-85 BEC machine at JILA (Papp, 2007; Papp and Wieman, 2006), which we discuss at the end of this article.
We calculate the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) occupation statistics vs. the interparticle interaction in a dilute gas with a nonuniform condensate in a box trap within the Bogoliubov approach. The results are compared against the previously found BEC-occupation statistics in (i) an ideal gas and (ii) a weakly interacting gas with a uniform condensate. In particular, we reveal and explicitly describe an appearance of a nontrivial transition from the ideal gas to the Thomas-Fermi regime. The results include finding the main regimes of the BEC statistics - the anomalous non-Gaussian thermally-dominated fluctuations and the Gaussian quantum-dominated fluctuations - as well as a crossover between them and their manifestations in a mesoscopic system. Remarkably, we show that the effect of the boundary conditions, imposed at the box trap, on the BEC fluctuations does not vanish in the thermodynamic limit of a macroscopic system even in the presence of the interparticle interactions. Finally, we discuss a challenging problem of an experimental verification of the theory of the BEC fluctuations addressing a much deeper level of the many-body statistical physics than usually studied quantities related to the mean condensate occupation.
We present the production of dual-species Bose-Einstein condensates of $^{39}mathrm{K}$ and $^{87}mathrm{Rb}$. Preparation of both species in the $left| F=1,m_F=-1 rightrangle$ state enabled us to exploit a total of three Fesh-bach resonances which allows for simultaneous Feshbach tuning of the $^{39}mathrm{K}$ intraspecies and the $^{39}mathrm{K}$-$^{87}mathrm{Rb}$ interspecies scattering length. Thus dual-species Bose-Einstein condensates were produced by sympathetic cooling of $^{39}mathrm{K}$ with $^{87}mathrm{Rb}$. A dark spontaneous force optical trap was used for $^{87}mathrm{Rb}$, to reduce the losses in $^{39}mathrm{K}$ due to light-assisted collisions in the optical trapping phase, which can be of benefit for other dual-species experiments. The tunability of the scattering length was used to perform precision spectroscopy of the interspecies Feshbach resonance located at $117.56(2),mathrm{G}$ and to determine the width of the resonance to $1.21(5),mathrm{G}$ by rethermalization measurements. The transition region from miscible to immiscible dual-species condensates was investigated and the interspecies background scattering length was determined to $28.5,a_mathrm{0}$ using an empirical model. This paves the way for dual-species experiments with $^{39}mathrm{K}$ and $^{87}mathrm{Rb}$ BECs ranging from molecular physics to precision metrology.
We report the spin texture formation resulting from the magnetic dipole-dipole interaction in a spin-2 $^{87}$Rb Bose-Einstein condensate. The spinor condensate is prepared in the transversely polarized spin state and the time evolution is observed under a magnetic field of 90 mG with a gradient of 3 mG/cm using Stern-Gerlach imaging. The experimental results are compared with numerical simulations of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, which reveals that the observed spatial modulation of the longitudinal magnetization is due to the spin precession in an effective magnetic field produced by the dipole-dipole interaction. These results show that the dipole-dipole interaction has considerable effects even on spinor condensates of alkali metal atoms.
Landaus description of the excitations in a macroscopic system in terms of quasiparticles stands out as one of the highlights in quantum physics. It provides an accurate description of otherwise prohibitively complex many-body systems, and has led to the development of several key technologies. In this paper, we investigate theoretically the Landau effective interaction between quasiparticles, so-called Bose polarons, formed by impurity particles immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). In the limit of weak interactions between the impurities and the BEC, we derive rigorous results for the effective interaction. They show that it can be strong even for weak impurity-boson interaction, if the transferred momentum/energy between the quasiparticles is resonant with a sound mode in the BEC. We then develop a diagrammatic scheme to calculate the effective interaction for arbitrary coupling strengths, which recovers the correct weak coupling results. Using this, we show that the Landau effective interaction in general is significantly stronger than that between quasiparticles in a Fermi gas, mainly because a BEC is more compressible than a Fermi gas. The interaction is particularly large near the unitarity limit of the impurity-boson scattering, or when the quasiparticle momentum is close to the threshold for momentum relaxation in the BEC. Finally, we show how the Landau effective interaction leads to a sizeable shift of the quasiparticle energy with increasing impurity concentration, which should be detectable with present day experimental techniques.
We demonstrate a production of large-area $^{87}$Rb Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) using a non-Gaussian optical dipole trap (ODT). The ODT is formed by focusing a symmetrically truncated Gaussian laser beam and it is shown that the beam clipping causes the trap geometry elongated and flattened along the beam axis direction. In the clipped-Gaussian ODT, an elongated, highly oblate BEC of $^{87}$Rb is generated with length and width of approximately $470~mutextrm{m}$ and $130~mutextrm{m}$, respectively, where the condensate healing length is estimated to be $xiapprox 0.25~mutextrm{m}$ at the trap center. The ODT is characterized to have a quartic trapping potential along the beam axis and the atom density of the condensate is uniform within 10% over $1000xi$ in the central region. Finally, we discuss the prospect of conducting vortex shedding experiments using the elongated condensate.