No Arabic abstract
We simulate ultra-cold interacting Bosons in quasi-one-dimensional, incommensurate optical lattices. In the tight-binding limit, these lattices have pseudo-random on-site energies and thus can potentially lead to Anderson localization. We explore the parameter regimes that lead to Anderson localization and investigate the role of repulsive interactions, harmonic confinement and finite temperature. We find that interactions can obscure the exponential localization characteristic of Anderson localization, thus impeding the direct observation of this phenomenon when interactions are present.
Spin-orbit coupling is an important ingredient in many recently discovered phenomena such as the spin-Hall effect and topological insulators. Of particular interest is topological superconductivity, with its potential application in topological quantum computation. The absence of disorder in ultra-cold atomic systems makes them ideal for quantum computation applications, however, the spin-orbit (SO) coupling schemes proposed thus far are experimentally impractical owing to large spontaneous emission rates in the alkali fermions. In this paper, we develop a scheme to generate Rashba SO coupling with a low spontaneous emission extension to a recent experiment. We show that this scheme generates a Fermi surface spin texture for $^{40}rm{K}$ atoms, which is observable in time-of-flight measurements. The chiral spin texture, together with conventional $s$-wave interactions leads to topological superconductivity and non-Abelian Majorana quasiparticles.
We perform a theoretical study into how dipole-dipole interactions modify the properties of superfluid vortices within the context of a two-dimensional atomic Bose gas of co-oriented dipoles. The reduced density at a vortex acts like a giant anti-dipole, changing the density profile and generating an effective dipolar potential centred at the vortex core whose most slowly decaying terms go as $1/rho^2$ and $ln(rho)/rho^3$. These effects modify the vortex-vortex interaction which, in particular, becomes anisotropic for dipoles polarized in the plane. Striking modifications to vortex-vortex dynamics are demonstrated, i.e. anisotropic co-rotation dynamics and the suppression of vortex annihilation.
We theoretically analyze superradiant emission of light from a cold atomic gas, when mechanical effects of photon-atom interactions are considered. The atoms are confined within a standing-wave resonator and an atomic metastable dipolar transition couples to a cavity mode. The atomic dipole is incoherently pumped in the parameter regime that would correspond to stationary superradiance in absence of inhomogeneous broadening. Starting from the master equation for cavity field and atomic degrees of freedom we derive a mean-field model that allows us to determine a threshold temperature, above which thermal fluctuations suppress superradiant emission. We then analyze the dynamics of superradiant emission when the motion is described by a mean-field model. In the semiclassical regime and below the threshold temperature we observe that the emitted light can be either coherent or chaotic, depending on the incoherent pump rate. We then analyze superradiant emission from an ideal Bose gas at zero temperature when the superradiant decay rate $Lambda$ is of the order of the recoil frequency $omega_R$. We show that the quantized exchange of mechanical energy between the atoms and the field gives rise to a threshold, $Lambda_c$, below which superradiant emission is damped down to zero. When $Lambda>Lambda_c$ superradiant emission is accompanied by the formation of matter-wave gratings diffracting the emitted photons. The stability of these gratings depends on the incoherent pump rate $w$ with respect to a second threshold value $w_c$. For $w>w_c$ the gratings are stable and the system achieves stationary superradiance. Below this second threshold the coupled dynamics becomes chaotic. We characterize the dynamics across these two thresholds and show that the three phases we predict (incoherent, coherent, chaotic) can be revealed via the coherence properties of the light at the cavity output.
We propose to detect quadrupole interactions of neutral ultra-cold atoms via their induced mean-field shift. We consider a Mott insulator state of spin-polarized atoms in a two-dimensional optical square lattice. The quadrupole moments of the atoms are aligned by an external magnetic field. As the alignment angle is varied, the mean-field shift shows a characteristic angular dependence, which constitutes the defining signature of the quadrupole interaction. For the $^{3}P_{2}$ states of Yb and Sr atoms, we find a frequency shift of the order of tens of Hertz, which can be realistically detected in experiment with current technology. We compare our results to the mean-field shift of a spin-polarized quasi-2D Fermi gas in continuum.
We develop a finite-temperature hydrodynamic approach for a harmonically trapped one-dimensional quasicondensate and apply it to describe the phenomenon of frequency doubling in the breathing-mode oscillations of its momentum distribution. The doubling here refers to the oscillation frequency relative to the oscillations of the real-space density distribution, invoked by a sudden confinement quench. We find that the frequency doubling is governed by the quench strength and the initial temperature, rather than by the crossover from the ideal Bose gas to the quasicondensate regime. The hydrodynamic predictions are supported by the results of numerical simulations based on a finite-temperature c-field approach, and extend the utility of the hydrodynamic theory for low-dimensional quantum gases to the description of finite-temperature systems and their dynamics in momentum space.