No Arabic abstract
We investigate the polarons formed by immersing a spinor impurity in a ferromagnetic state of $F=1$ spinor Bose-Einstein condensate. The ground state energies and effective masses of the polarons are calculated in both weak-coupling regime and strong-coupling regime. In the weakly interacting regime the second order perturbation theory is performed. In the strong coupling regime we use a simple variational treatment. The analytical approximations to the energy and effective mass of the polarons are constructed. Especially, a transition from the mobile state to the self-trapping state of the polaron in the strong coupling regime is discussed. We also estimate the signatures of polaron effects in spinor BEC for the future experiments.
We measure the mass, gap, and magnetic moment of a magnon in the ferromagnetic $F=1$ spinor Bose-Einstein condensate of $^{87}$Rb. We find an unusually heavy magnon mass of $1.038(2)_mathrm{stat}(8)_mathrm{sys}$ times the atomic mass, as determined by interfering standing and running coherent magnon waves within the dense and trapped condensed gas. This measurement is shifted significantly from theoretical estimates. The magnon energy gap of $htimes 2.5(1)_mathrm{stat}(2)_mathrm{sys};mathrm{Hz}$ and the effective magnetic moment of $-1.04(2)_mathrm{stat}(8),mu_textrm{bare}$ times the atomic magnetic moment are consistent with mean-field predictions. The nonzero energy gap arises from magnetic dipole-dipole interactions.
Topological phase imprinting is a well-established technique for deterministic vortex creation in spinor Bose-Einstein condensates of alkali metal atoms. It was recently shown that counter-diabatic quantum control may accelerate vortex creation in comparison to the standard adiabatic protocol and suppress the atom loss due to nonadiabatic transitions. Here we apply this technique, assisted by an optical plug, for vortex pumping to theoretically show that sequential phase imprinting up to 20 cycles generates a vortex with a very large winding number. Our method significantly increases the fidelity of the pump for rapid pumping compared to the case without the counter-diabatic control, leading to the highest angular momentum per particle reported to date for the vortex pump. Our studies are based on numerical integration of the three-dimensional multi-component Gross-Pitaevskii equation which conveniently yields the density profiles, phase profiles, angular momentum, and other physically important quantities of the spin-1 system. Our results motivate the experimental realization of the vortex pump and studies of the rich physics it involves.
Excited-state quantum phase transitions (ESQPTs) extend the notion of quantum phase transitions beyond the ground state. They are characterized by closing energy gaps amid the spectrum. Identifying order parameters for ESQPTs poses however a major challenge. We introduce spinor Bose-Einstein condensates as a versatile platform for studies of ESQPTs. Based on the mean-field dynamics, we define a topological order parameter that distinguishes between excited-state phases, and discuss how to interferometrically access the order parameter in current experiments. Our work opens the way for the experimental characterization of excited-state quantum phases in atomic many-body systems.
The fragmentation of spin-orbit coupled spin-1 Bose gas with a weak interaction in external harmonic trap is explored by both exact diagonalization and mean-field theory. This fragmentation tendency, which originates from the total angular momentum conservation, is affected obviously by the spin-orbit coupling strength and the spin-dependent interaction. Strong spin-orbit interaction raises the inverse participation ratio, which describes the number of significantly occupied single-particle states. As the spin-dependent interaction changes from anti-ferromagnetic to ferromagnetic, the peak values in the inverse participation ratio become lower. Without the confinement of the appointed total angular momentum, the condensate chooses a zero or finite total angular momentum ground state, which is determined by both the interaction and the spin-orbit coupling strength.
We develop a symmetry classification scheme to find ground states of pseudo spin-1/2, spin-1, and spin-2 spin-orbit coupled spinor Bose-Einstein condensates, and show that as the SO(2) symmetry of simultaneous spin and space rotations is broken into discrete cyclic groups, various types of lattice structures emerge in the absence of a lattice potential, examples include two different kagaome lattices for pseudo spin-1/2 condensates and a nematic vortex lattice in which uniaxial and biaxial spin textures align alternatively for spin-2 condensates. For the pseudo spin-1/2 system, although mean-field states always break time-reversal symmetry, there exists a time-reversal invariant many-body ground state, which is fragmented and expected to be observed in a micro-condensate.