No Arabic abstract
We characterize the immiscibility-miscibility transition (IMT) of a two-component Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with dipole-dipole interactions. In particular, we consider the quasi-two dimensional geometry, where a strong trapping potential admits only zero-point motion in the trap direction, while the atoms are more free to move in the transverse directions. We employ the Bogoliubov treatment of the two-component system to identify both the well-known long-wavelength IMT in addition to a roton-like IMT, where the transition occurs at finite-wave number and is reminiscent of the roton softening in the single component dipolar BEC. Additionally, we verify the existence of the roton IMT in the fully trapped, finite systems by direct numerical simulation of the two-component coupled non-local Gross-Pitaevskii equations.
We discuss fluctuations in a dilute two-dimensional Bose-condensed dipolar gas, which has a roton-maxon character of the excitation spectrum. We calculate the density-density correlation function, fluctuation corrections to the chemical potential, compressibility, and the normal (superfluid) fraction. It is shown that the presence of the roton strongly enhances fluctuations of the density, and we establish the validity criterion of the Bogoliubov approach. At T=0 the condensate depletion becomes significant if the roton minimum is sufficiently close to zero. At finite temperatures exceeding the roton energy, the effect of thermal fluctuations is stronger and it may lead to a large normal fraction of the gas and compressibility.
We measure the excitation spectrum of a stable dipolar Bose--Einstein condensate over a wide momentum-range via Bragg spectroscopy. We precisely control the relative strength, $epsilon_{rm dd}$, of the dipolar to the contact interactions and observe that the spectrum increasingly deviates from the linear phononic behavior for increasing $epsilon_{rm dd}$. Reaching the dipolar dominated regime $epsilon_{rm dd}>1$, we observe the emergence of a roton minimum in the spectrum and its softening towards instability. We characterize how the excitation energy and the strength of the density-density correlations at the roton momentum vary with $epsilon_{rm dd}$. Our findings are in excellent agreement with numerical calculations based on mean-field Bogoliubov theory. When including beyond-mean-field corrections, in the form of a Lee-Huang-Yang potential, we observe a quantitative deviation from the experiment, questioning the validity of such a description in the roton regime.
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.
We observe signatures of radial and angular roton excitations around a droplet crystallization transition in dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates. In situ measurements are used to characterize the density fluctuations near this transition. The static structure factor is extracted and used to identify the radial and angular roton excitations by their characteristic symmetries. These fluctuations peak as a function of interaction strength indicating the crystallization transition of the system. We compare our observations to a theoretically calculated excitation spectrum allowing us to connect the crystallization mechanism with the softening of the angular roton modes.
The concept of a roton, a special kind of elementary excitation, forming a minimum of energy at finite momentum, has been essential to understand the properties of superfluid $^4$He. In quantum liquids, rotons arise from the strong interparticle interactions, whose microscopic description remains debated. In the realm of highly-controllable quantum gases, a roton mode has been predicted to emerge due to magnetic dipole-dipole interactions despite of their weakly-interacting character. This prospect has raised considerable interest; yet roton modes in dipolar quantum gases have remained elusive to observations. Here we report experimental and theoretical studies of the momentum distribution in Bose-Einstein condensates of highly-magnetic erbium atoms, revealing the existence of the long-sought roton mode. By quenching the interactions, we observe the roton appearance of peaks at well-defined momentum. The roton momentum follows the predicted geometrical scaling with the inverse of the confinement length along the magnetisation axis. From the growth of the roton population, we probe the roton softening of the excitation spectrum in time and extract the corresponding imaginary roton gap. Our results provide a further step in the quest towards supersolidity in dipolar quantum gases.