No Arabic abstract
It is well known that the charge current in a conductor is proportional to the applied electric field. This famous relation, known as Ohms law, is the result of relaxation of the current due to charge carriers undergoing collisions, predominantly with impurities and lattice vibrations in the material. The field of spintronics, where the spin of the electron is manipulated rather than its charge, has recently also led to interest in spin currents. Contrary to charge currents, these spin currents can be subject to strong relaxation due to collisions between different spin species, a phenomenon known as spin drag. This effect has been observed for electrons in semi-conductorscite{Weber} and for cold fermionic atoms, where in both cases it is reduced at low temperatures due to the fermionic nature of the particles. Here, we perform a transport experiment using ultra-cold bosonic atoms and observe spin drag for bosons for the first time. By lowering the temperature we find that spin drag for bosons is enhanced in the quantum regime due to Bose stimulation, which is in agreement with recent theoretical predictions. Our work on bosonic transport shows that this field may be as rich as transport in solid-state physics and may lead to the development of advanced devices in atomtronics.
We use kinetic theory to model the dynamics of a small Bose condensed cloud of heavy particles moving through a larger degenerate Fermi gas of light particles. Varying the Bose-Fermi interaction, we find a crossover between bulk and surface dominated regimes -- where scattering occurs throughout the Bose cloud, or solely on the surface. We calculate the damping and frequency shift of the dipole mode in a harmonic trap as a function of the magnetic field controlling an inter-species Feshbach resonance. We find excellent agreement between our stochastic model and the experimental studies of Cs-Li mixtures.
The spin dynamics of a harmonically trapped Bose-Einstein condensed binary mixture of sodium atoms is experimentally investigated at finite temperature. In the collisional regime the motion of the thermal component is shown to be damped because of spin drag, while the two condensates exhibit a counter flow oscillation without friction, thereby providing direct evidence for spin superfluidity. Results are also reported in the collisionless regime where the spin components of both the condensate and thermal part oscillate without damping, their relative motion being driven by a mean field effect. We also measure the static polarizability of the condensed and thermal parts and we find a large increase of the condensate polarizability with respect to the T=0 value, in agreement with the predictions of theory.
We study the effect of thermal and quantum fluctuations on the dynamical response of a one-dimensional strongly-interacting Bose gas in a tight atomic waveguide. We combine the Luttinger liquid theory at arbitrary interactions and the exact Bose-Fermi mapping in the Tonks-Girardeau-impenetrable-boson limit to obtain the dynamic structure factor of the strongly-interacting fluid at finite temperature. Then, we determine the drag force felt by a potential barrier moving along the fluid in the experimentally realistic situation of finite barrier width and temperature.
We discuss the superfluid properties of a Bose-Einstein condensed gas with spin-orbit coupling, recently realized in experiments. We find a finite normal fluid density $rho_n$ at zero temperature which turns out to be a function of the Raman coupling. In particular, the entire fluid becomes normal at the transition point from the zero momentum to the plane wave phase, even though the condensate fraction remains finite. We emphasize the crucial role played by the gapped branch of the elementary excitations and discuss its contributions to various sum rules. Finally, we prove that an independent definition of superfluid density $rho_s$, using the phase twist method, satisfies the equality $rho_n+rho_s=rho$, the total density, despite the breaking of Galilean invariance.
We generate spin currents in an $^{87}$Rb spin-2 Bose-Einstein condensate by application of a magnetic field gradient. The spin current destroys the spin polarization, leading to a sudden onset of two-body collisions. In addition, the spin coherence, as measured by the fringe contrast using Ramsey interferometry, is reduced drastically but experiences a weak revival due to in-trap oscillations. The spin current can be controlled using periodic $pi$ pulses (bang-bang control), producing longer spin coherence times. Our results show that spin coherence can be maintained even in the presence of spin currents, with applications to quantum sensing in noisy environments.