We have measured the effect of dipole-dipole interactions on the frequency of a collective mode of a Bose-Einstein condensate. At relatively large numbers of atoms, the experimental measurements are in good agreement with zero temperature theoretical predictions based on the Thomas Fermi approach. Experimental results obtained for the dipolar shift of a collective mode show a larger dependency to both the trap geometry and the atom number than the ones obtained when measuring the modification of the condensate aspect ratio due to dipolar forces. These findings are in good agreement with simulations based on a gaussian ansatz.
We consider the quasi-particle excitations of a trapped dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate. By mapping these excitations onto radial and angular momentum we show that the roton modes are clearly revealed as discrete fingers in parameter space, whereas the other modes form a smooth surface. We examine the properties of the roton modes and characterize how they change with the dipole interaction strength. We demonstrate how the application of a perturbing potential can be used to engineer angular rotons, i.e. allowing us to controllably select modes of non-zero angular momentum to become the lowest energy rotons.
Significant experimental progress has been made recently for observing long-sought supersolid-like states in Bose-Einstein condensates, where spatial translational symmetry is spontaneously broken by anisotropic interactions to form a stripe order. Meanwhile, the superfluid stripe ground state was also observed by applying a weak optical lattice that forces the symmetry breaking. Despite of the similarity of the ground states, here we show that these two symmetry breaking mechanisms can be distinguished by their collective excitation spectra. In contrast to gapless Goldstone modes of the textit{spontaneous} stripe state, we propose that the excitation spectra of the textit{forced} stripe phase can provide direct experimental evidence for the long-sought gapped pseudo-Goldstone modes. We characterize the pseudo-Goldstone mode of such lattice-induced stripe phase through its excitation spectrum and static structure factor. Our work may pave the way for exploring spontaneous and forced/approximate symmetry breaking mechanisms in different physical systems.
We investigate the collective excitations of a Raman-induced spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensate confined in a quasi one-dimension harmonic trap using the Bogoliubov method. By tuning the Raman coupling strength, three phases of the system can be identified. By calculating the transition strength, we are able to classify various excitation modes that are experimentally relevant. We show that the three quantum phases possess distinct features in their collective excitation properties. In particular, the spin dipole and the spin breathing modes can be used to clearly map out the phase boundaries. We confirm these predictions by direct numerical simulations of the quench dynamics that excites the relevant collective modes.
We measure the collective excitation spectrum of a spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensate using Bragg spectroscopy. The spin-orbit coupling is generated by Raman dressing of atomic hyperfine states. When the Raman detuning is reduced, mode softening at a finite momentum is revealed, which provides insight towards a supersolid-like phase transition. We find that for the parameters of our system, this softening stops at a finite excitation gap and is symmetric under a sign change of the Raman detuning. Finally, using a moving barrier that is swept through the BEC, we also show the effect of the collective excitation on the fluid dynamics.
The ground state of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a two-dimensional trap potential is analyzed numerically at the infinite-particle limit. It is shown that the anisotropy of the many-particle position variance along the $x$ and $y$ axes can be opposite when computed at the many-body and mean-field levels of theory. This is despite the system being $100%$ condensed, and the respective energies per particle and densities per particle to coincide.