No Arabic abstract
We experimentally study the emergence of high-energy equilibrium states in a chiral vortex gas of like-circulation vortices realized within a disk-shaped atomic Bose-Einstein condensate. In contrast to the familiar triangular Abrikosov lattice, the lowest-energy state of the superfluid in a rotating frame, we observe the formation of rotating vortex equilibria that are highly disordered and have significant energy per vortex. Experimental stirring protocols realize equilibrium states at both positive and negative absolute temperatures of the vortex gas. At sufficiently high energies the system exhibits a symmetry breaking transition, resulting in an off-axis equilibrium phase that no longer shares the symmetry of the container. By initializing vortices in a non-equilibrium distribution with sufficient energy, relaxation to equilibrium is observed within experimental timescales and an off-axis equilibrium state emerges at negative absolute temperature. The observed equilibria are in close agreement with mean field theory of the microcanonical ensemble of the vortex gas.
Adding energy to a system through transient stirring usually leads to more disorder. In contrast, point-like vortices in a bounded two-dimensional fluid are predicted to reorder above a certain energy, forming persistent vortex clusters. Here we realize experimentally these vortex clusters in a planar superfluid: a $^{87}$Rb Bose-Einstein condensate confined to an elliptical geometry. We demonstrate that the clusters persist for long times, maintaining the superfluid system in a high energy state far from global equilibrium. Our experiments explore a regime of vortex matter at negative absolute temperatures, and have relevance to the dynamics of topological defects, two-dimensional turbulence, and systems such as helium films, nonlinear optical materials, fermion superfluids, and quark-gluon plasmas.
If a quantum fluid is driven with enough angular momentum, at equilibrium the ground state of the system is given by a lattice of quantised vortices whose density is prescribed by the quantization of circulation. We report on the first experimental study of the Feynman-Onsager relation in a non-equilibrium polariton fluid, free to expand and rotate. Upon initially imprinting a lattice of vortices in the quantum fluid, we track the vortex core positions on picosecond time scales. We observe an accelerated stretching of the lattice and an outward bending of the linear trajectories of the vortices, due to the repulsive polariton interactions. Access to the full density and phase fields allows us to detect a small deviation from the Feynman-Onsager rule in terms of a transverse velocity component, due to the density gradient of the fluid envelope acting on the vortex lattice.
We present an alternative method for determining the sound velocity in atomic Bose-Einstein condensates, based on thermodynamic global variables. The total number of trapped atoms was as a function of temperature carefully studied across the phase transition, at constant volume. It allowed us to evaluate the sound velocity resulting in consistent values from the quantum to classical regime, in good agreement with previous results found in literature. We also provide some insight about the dominant sound mode (thermal or superfluid) across a wide temperature range.
We derive a governing equation for a Kelvin wave supported on a vortex line in a Bose-Einstein condensate, in a rotating cylindrically symmetric parabolic trap. From this solution the Kelvin wave dispersion relation is determined. In the limit of an oblate trap and in the absence of longitudinal trapping our results are consistent with previous work. We show that the derived Kelvin wave dispersion in the general case is in quantitative agreement with numerical calculations of the Bogoliubov spectrum and offer a significant improvement upon previous analytical work.
While ergodicity is a fundamental postulate of statistical mechanics and implies that driven interacting systems inevitably heat, ergodic dynamics can be disrupted by quantum interference. Despite a quarter-century of experimental studies, the effect of many-body interactions on the resulting dynamically localized state has remained unexplored. We report the experimental realization of a tunably-interacting kicked quantum rotor ensemble using a Bose-Einstein condensate in a pulsed optical lattice. We observe a prethermal localized plateau, which survives for hundreds of kicks, followed by interaction-induced anomalous diffusion. Echo-type time reversal experiments establish the role of interactions in destroying reversibility, and a mapping to kicked spin models illustrates connections to many-body dynamical localization in spin chains. These results demonstrate a dynamical transition to many-body quantum chaos, and illuminate and delimit possibilities for globally protecting quantum information in interacting driven quantum systems.