No Arabic abstract
We experimentally study the dynamics of a degenerate one-dimensional Bose gas that is subject to a continuous outcoupling of atoms. Although standard evaporative cooling is rendered ineffective by the absence of thermalizing collisions in this system, we observe substantial cooling. This cooling proceeds through homogeneous particle dissipation and many-body dephasing, enabling the preparation of otherwise unexpectedly low temperatures. Our observations establish a scaling relation between temperature and particle number, and provide insights into equilibration in the quantum world.
We analyze free expansion of a trapped one-dimensional Bose gas after a sudden release from the confining trap potential. By using the stationary phase and local density approximations, we show that the long-time asymptotic density profile and the momentum distribution of the gas are determined by the initial distribution of Bethe rapidities (quasimomenta) and hence can be obtained from the solutions to the Lieb-Liniger equations in the thermodynamic limit. For expansion from a harmonic trap, and in the limits of very weak and very strong interactions, we recover the self-similar scaling solutions known from the hydrodynamic approach. For all other power-law traps and arbitrary interaction strengths, the expansion is not self-similar and shows strong dependence of the density profile evolution on the trap anharmonicity. We also characterize dynamical fermionization of the expanding cloud in terms of correlation functions describing phase and density fluctuations.
We calculate the spatial distributions and the dynamics of a few-body two-component strongly interacting Bose gas confined to an effectively one-dimensional trapping potential. We describe the densities for each component in the trap for different interaction and population imbalances. We calculate the time evolution of the system and show that, for a certain ratio of interactions, the minority population travels through the system as an effective wave packet.
We prepare a chemically and thermally one-dimensional (1d) quantum degenerate Bose gas in a single microtrap. We introduce a new interferometric method to distinguish the quasicondensate fraction of the gas from the thermal cloud at finite temperature. We reach temperatures down to $kTapprox 0.5hbaromega_perp$ (transverse oscillator eigenfrequency $omega_perp$) when collisional thermalization slows down as expected in 1d. At the lowest temperatures the transverse momentum distribution exhibits a residual dependence on the line density $n_{1d}$, characteristic for 1d systems. For very low densities the approach to the transverse single particle ground state is linear in $n_{1d}$.
We analyze the two-body momentum correlation function for a uniform weakly interacting one-dimensional Bose gas. We show that the strong positive correlation between opposite momenta, expected in a Bose-Einstein condensate with a true long-range order, almost vanishes in a phase-fluctuating quasicondensate where the long-range order is destroyed. Using the Luttinger liquid approach, we derive an analytic expression for the momentum correlation function in the quasicondensate regime, showing (i) the reduction and broadening of the opposite-momentum correlations (compared to the singular behavior in a true condensate) and (ii) an emergence of anticorrelations at small momenta. We also numerically investigate the momentum correlations in the crossover between the quasicondensate and the ideal Bose-gas regimes using a classical field approach and show how the anticorrelations gradually disappear in the ideal-gas limit.
Two-dimensional (2D) systems play a special role in many-body physics. Because of thermal fluctuations, they cannot undergo a conventional phase transition associated to the breaking of a continuous symmetry. Nevertheless they may exhibit a phase transition to a state with quasi-long range order via the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) mechanism. A paradigm example is the 2D Bose fluid, such as a liquid helium film, which cannot Bose-condense at non-zero temperature although it becomes superfluid above a critical phase space density. Ultracold atomic gases constitute versatile systems in which the 2D quasi-long range coherence and the microscopic nature of the BKT transition were recently explored. However, a direct observation of superfluidity in terms of frictionless flow is still missing for these systems. Here we probe the superfluidity of a 2D trapped Bose gas with a moving obstacle formed by a micron-sized laser beam. We find a dramatic variation of the response of the fluid, depending on its degree of degeneracy at the obstacle location. In particular we do not observe any significant heating in the central, highly degenerate region if the velocity of the obstacle is below a critical value.