No Arabic abstract
Understanding the rich behavior that emerges from systems of interacting quantum particles, such as electrons in materials, nucleons in nuclei or neutron stars, the quark-gluon plasma, and superfluid liquid helium, requires investigation of systems that are clean, accessible, and have tunable parameters. Ultracold quantum gases offer tremendous promise for this application largely due to an unprecedented control over interactions. Specifically, $a$, the two-body scattering length that characterizes the interaction strength, can be tuned to any value. This offers prospects for experimental access to regimes where the behavior is not well understood because interactions are strong, atom-atom correlations are important, mean-field theory is inadequate, and equilibrium may not be reached or perhaps does not even exist. Of particular interest is the unitary gas, where $a$ is infinite, and where many aspects of the system are universal in that they depend only on the particle density and quantum statistics. While the unitary Fermi gas has been the subject of intense experimental and theoretical investigation, the degenerate unitary Bose gas has generally been deemed experimentally inaccessible because of three-body loss rates that increase dramatically with increasing $a$. Here, we investigate dynamics of a unitary Bose gas for timescales that are short compared to the loss. We find that the momentum distribution of the unitary Bose gas evolves on timescales fast compared to losses, and that both the timescale for this evolution and the limiting shape of the momentum distribution are consistent with universal scaling with density. This work demonstrates that a unitary Bose gas can be created and probed dynamically, and thus opens the door for further exploration of this novel strongly interacting quantum liquid.
We report spectroscopic observation of Rydberg polarons in an atomic Bose gas. Polarons are created by excitation of Rydberg atoms as impurities in a strontium Bose-Einstein condensate. They are distinguished from previously studied polarons by macroscopic occupation of bound molecular states that arise from scattering of the weakly bound Rydberg electron from ground-state atoms. The absence of a $p$-wave resonance in the low-energy electron-atom scattering in Sr introduces a universal behavior in the Rydberg spectral lineshape and in scaling of the spectral width (narrowing) with the Rydberg principal quantum number, $n$. Spectral features are described with a functional determinant approach (FDA) that solves an extended Fr{o}hlich Hamiltonian for a mobile impurity in a Bose gas. Excited states of polyatomic Rydberg molecules (trimers, tetrameters, and pentamers) are experimentally resolved and accurately reproduced with FDA.
A proposed paradigm for out-of-equilibrium quantum systems is that an analogue of quantum phase transitions exists between parameter regimes of qualitatively distinct time-dependent behavior. Here, we present evidence of such a transition between dynamical phases in a cold-atom quantum simulator of the collective Heisenberg model. Our simulator encodes spin in the hyperfine states of ultracold fermionic potassium. Atoms are pinned in a network of single-particle modes, whose spatial extent emulates the long-range interactions of traditional quantum magnets. We find that below a critical interaction strength, magnetization of an initially polarized fermionic gas decays quickly, while above the transition point, the magnetization becomes long-lived, due to an energy gap that protects against dephasing by the inhomogeneous axial field. Our quantum simulation reveals a non-equilibrium transition predicted to exist but not yet directly observed in quenched s-wave superconductors.
The low temperature unitary Bose gas is a fundamental paradigm in few-body and many-body physics, attracting wide theoretical and experimental interest. Here we first present a theoretical model that describes the dynamic competition between two-body evaporation and three-body re-combination in a harmonically trapped unitary atomic gas above the condensation temperature. We identify a universal magic trap depth where, within some parameter range, evaporative cooling is balanced by recombination heating and the gas temperature stays constant. Our model is developed for the usual three-dimensional evaporation regime as well as the 2D evaporation case. Experiments performed with unitary 133 Cs and 7 Li atoms fully support our predictions and enable quantitative measurements of the 3-body recombination rate in the low temperature domain. In particular, we measure for the first time the Efimov inelasticity parameter $eta$ * = 0.098(7) for the 47.8-G d-wave Feshbach resonance in 133 Cs. Combined 133 Cs and 7 Li experimental data allow investigations of loss dynamics over two orders of magnitude in temperature and four orders of magnitude in three-body loss. We confirm the 1/T 2 temperature universality law up to the constant $eta$ *.
We unravel the nonequilibrium correlated quantum quench dynamics of an impurity traveling through a harmonically confined Bose-Einstein condensate in one-dimension. For weak repulsive interspecies interactions the impurity oscillates within the bosonic gas. At strong repulsions and depending on its prequench position the impurity moves towards an edge of the bosonic medium and subsequently equilibrates. This equilibration being present independently of the initial velocity, the position and the mass of the impurity is inherently related to the generation of entanglement in the many-body system. Focusing on attractive interactions the impurity performs a damped oscillatory motion within the bosonic bath, a behavior that becomes more evident for stronger attractions. To elucidate our understanding of the dynamics an effective potential picture is constructed. The effective mass of the emergent quasiparticle is measured and found to be generically larger than the bare one, especially for strong attractions. In all cases, a transfer of energy from the impurity to the bosonic medium takes place. Finally, by averaging over a sample of simulated in-situ single-shot images we expose how the single-particle density distributions and the two-body interspecies correlations can be probed.
We monitor the correlated quench induced dynamical dressing of a spinor impurity repulsively interacting with a Bose-Einstein condensate. Inspecting the temporal evolution of the structure factor three distinct dynamical regions arise upon increasing the interspecies interaction. These regions are found to be related to the segregated nature of the impurity and to the ohmic character of the bath. It is shown that the impurity dynamics can be described by an effective potential that deforms from a harmonic to a double-well one when crossing the miscibility-immiscibility threshold. In particular, for miscible components the polaron formation is imprinted on the spectral response of the system. We further illustrate that for increasing interaction an orthogonality catastrophe occurs and the polaron picture breaks down. Then a dissipative motion of the impurity takes place leading to a transfer of energy to its environment. This process signals the presence of entanglement in the many-body system.