No Arabic abstract
Recent experiments with dilute trapped Fermi gases observed that weak interactions can drastically modify spin transport dynamics and give rise to robust collective effects including global demagnetization, macroscopic spin waves, spin segregation, and spin self-rephasing. In this work we develop a framework for studying the dynamics of weakly interacting fermionic gases following a spin-dependent change of the trapping potential which illuminates the interplay between spin, motion, Fermi statistics, and interactions. The key idea is the projection of the state of the system onto a set of lattice spin models defined on the single-particle mode space. Collective phenomena, including the global spreading of quantum correlations in real space, arise as a consequence of the long-ranged character of the spin model couplings. This approach achieves good agreement with prior measurements and suggests a number of directions for future experiments.
Motivated by several experimental efforts to understand spin diffusion and transport in ultracold fermionic gases, we study the spin dynamics of initially spin-polarized ensembles of harmonically trapped non-interacting spin-1/2 fermionic atoms, subjected to a magnetic field gradient. We obtain simple analytic expressions for spin observables in the presence of both constant and linear magnetic field gradients, with and without a spin-echo pulse, and at zero and finite temperatures. The analysis shows the relevance of spin-motional coupling in the non-interacting regime where the demagnetization decay rate at short times can be faster than the experimentally measured rates in the strongly interacting regime under similar trapping conditions. Our calculations also show that particle motion limits the ability of a spin-echo pulse to remove the effect of magnetic field inhomogeneity, and that a spin-echo pulse can instead lead to an increased decay of magnetization at times comparable to the trapping period.
We study spin-1/2 fermions in spin dependent potentials under the emph{spin model approximation}, in which interatomic collisions that change the total occupation of single-particle modes are ignored. The spin model approximation maps the interacting fermion problem to an ensemble of lattice spin models in energy space, where spin-spin interactions are long-ranged and spin-anisotropic. We show that the spin model approximation is accurate for weak interactions compared to the harmonic oscillator frequency, and captures the collective spin dynamics to timescales much longer than would be expected from perturbation theory. We explore corrections to the spin model, and the relative importance of corrections when realistic anharmonic potential corrections are taken into account. Additionally, we present numerical techniques that are useful for analysis of spin models on an energy lattice, including enacting a change of single-particle basis on a many-body state as an effective time evolution, and fitting of spatially inhomogeneous long-range interactions with exponentials. This latter technique is useful for constructing matrix product operators for use in DMRG analyses, and may have broader applicability within the tensor network community.
We report on the experimental observation of a strongly interacting gas of ultracold two-electron fermions with orbital degree of freedom and magnetically tunable interactions. This realization has been enabled by the demonstration of a novel kind of Feshbach resonance occurring in the scattering of two 173Yb atoms in different nuclear and electronic states. The strongly interacting regime at resonance is evidenced by the observation of anisotropic hydrodynamic expansion of the two-orbital Fermi gas. These results pave the way towards the realization of new quantum states of matter with strongly correlated fermions with orbital degree of freedom.
Engineered spin-orbit coupling (SOC) in cold atom systems can aid in the study of novel synthetic materials and complex condensed matter phenomena. Despite great advances, alkali atom SOC systems are hindered by heating from spontaneous emission, which limits the observation of many-body effects, motivating research into potential alternatives. Here we demonstrate that SOC can be engineered to occur naturally in a one-dimensional fermionic 87Sr optical lattice clock (OLC). In contrast to previous SOC experiments, in this work the SOC is both generated and probed using a direct ultra-narrow optical clock transition between two electronic orbital states. We use clock spectroscopy to prepare lattice band populations, internal electronic states, and quasimomenta, as well as to produce SOC dynamics. The exceptionally long lifetime of the excited clock state (160 s) eliminates decoherence and atom loss from spontaneous emission at all relevant experimental timescales, allowing subsequent momentum- and spin-resolved in situ probing of the SOC band structure and eigenstates. We utilize these capabilities to study Bloch oscillations, spin-momentum locking, and Van Hove singularities in the transition density of states. Our results lay the groundwork for the use of OLCs to probe novel SOC phases of matter.
We propose and analyze a scheme to entangle the collective spin states of two spatially separated bimodal Bose-Einstein condensates. Using a four-mode approximation for the atomic field, we show that elastic collisions in a state-dependent potential simultaneously create spin-squeezing in each condensate and entangle the collective spins of the two condensates. We investigate mostly analytically the non-local quantum correlations that arise in this system at short times and show that Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) entanglement is generated between the condensates. At long times we point out macroscopic entangled states and explain their structure. The scheme can be implemented with condensates in state-dependent microwave potentials on an atom chip.