No Arabic abstract
A ring-shaped array of Bose-Einstein condensed atomic gases can display circular currents if the relative phase of neighboring condensates becomes locked to certain values. It is shown that, irrespective of the mechanism responsible for generating these states, only a restricted set of currents are stable, depending on the number of condensates, on the interaction and tunneling energies, and on the total number of particles. Different instabilities due to quasiparticle excitations are characterized and possible experimental setups for testing the stability prediction are also discussed.
We study the stability of persistent currents in a coherently coupled quasi-2D Bose-Einstein condensate confined in a ring trap at T=0. By numerically solving Gross-Pitaevskii equations and by analyzing the excitation spectrum obtained from diagonalization of the Bogoliubov-de Gennes matrix, we describe the mechanisms responsible for the decay of the persistent currents depending on the values of the interaction coupling constants and the Rabi frequency. When the unpolarized system decays due to an energetic instability in the density channel, the spectrum may develop a roton-like minimum, which gives rise to the finite wavelength excitation necessary for vortex nucleation at the inner surface. When decay in the unpolarized system is driven by spin-density excitations, the finite wavelength naturally arises from the existence of a gap in the excitation spectrum. In the polarized phase of the coherently coupled condensate, there is an hybridization of the excitation modes that leads to complex decay dynamics. In particular, close to the phase transition, a state of broken rotational symmetry is found to be stationary and stable.
We study conditions under which vortices in a highly oblate harmonically trapped Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) can be stabilized due to pinning by a blue-detuned Gaussian laser beam, with particular emphasis on the potentially destabilizing effects of laser beam positioning within the BEC. Our approach involves theoretical and numerical exploration of dynamically and energetically stable pinning of vortices with winding number up to $S=6$, in correspondence with experimental observations. Stable pinning is quantified theoretically via Bogoliubov-de Gennes excitation spectrum computations and confirmed via direct numerical simulations for a range of conditions similar to those of experimental observations. The theoretical and numerical results indicate that the pinned winding number, or equivalently the winding number of the superfluid current about the laser beam, decays as a laser beam of fixed intensity moves away from the BEC center. Our theoretical analysis helps explain previous experimental observations, and helps define limits of stable vortex pinning for future experiments involving vortex manipulation by laser beams.
We create and study persistent currents in a toroidal two-component Bose gas, consisting of $^{87}$Rb atoms in two different spin states. For a large spin-population imbalance we observe supercurrents persisting for over two minutes. However we find that the supercurrent is unstable for spin polarisation below a well defined critical value. We also investigate the role of phase coherence between the two spin components and show that only the magnitude of the spin-polarisation vector, rather than its orientation in spin space, is relevant for supercurrent stability.
Interference of an array of independent Bose-Einstein condensates, whose experiment has been performed recently, is theoretically studied in detail. Even if the number of the atoms in each gas is kept finite and the phases of the gases are not well defined, interference fringes are observed on each snapshot. The statistics of the snapshot interference patterns, i.e., the average fringe amplitudes and their fluctuations (covariance), are computed analytically, and concise formulas for their asymptotic values for long time of flight are derived. Processes contributing to these quantities are clarified and the relationship with the description on the basis of the symmetry-breaking scenario is revealed.
The dynamics of a discrete soliton in an array of Bose-Einstein condensates under the action of a periodically time-modulated atomic scattering length (``Feshbach-resonance management, FRM) is investigated. The cases of both slow and rapid modulation, in comparison with the tunneling frequency, are considered. We employ a discrete variational approach for the analysis of the system. The existence of nonlinear resonances and chaos is predicted at special values of the driving frequency. Soliton splitting is observed in numerical simulations. In the case of the rapid modulation, we derive an averaged equation, which is a generalized discrete nonlinear Schroedinger equation, including higher-order effective nonlinearities and intersite nonlinear interactions. Thus the predicted discrete FRM solitons are a direct matter-wave analog of recently investigated discrete diffraction-managed optical solitons.