No Arabic abstract
We investigate the collective excitations of a Raman-induced spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensate confined in a quasi one-dimension harmonic trap using the Bogoliubov method. By tuning the Raman coupling strength, three phases of the system can be identified. By calculating the transition strength, we are able to classify various excitation modes that are experimentally relevant. We show that the three quantum phases possess distinct features in their collective excitation properties. In particular, the spin dipole and the spin breathing modes can be used to clearly map out the phase boundaries. We confirm these predictions by direct numerical simulations of the quench dynamics that excites the relevant collective modes.
The ground state of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a two-dimensional trap potential is analyzed numerically at the infinite-particle limit. It is shown that the anisotropy of the many-particle position variance along the $x$ and $y$ axes can be opposite when computed at the many-body and mean-field levels of theory. This is despite the system being $100%$ condensed, and the respective energies per particle and densities per particle to coincide.
We have measured the effect of dipole-dipole interactions on the frequency of a collective mode of a Bose-Einstein condensate. At relatively large numbers of atoms, the experimental measurements are in good agreement with zero temperature theoretical predictions based on the Thomas Fermi approach. Experimental results obtained for the dipolar shift of a collective mode show a larger dependency to both the trap geometry and the atom number than the ones obtained when measuring the modification of the condensate aspect ratio due to dipolar forces. These findings are in good agreement with simulations based on a gaussian ansatz.
We measure the collective excitation spectrum of a spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensate using Bragg spectroscopy. The spin-orbit coupling is generated by Raman dressing of atomic hyperfine states. When the Raman detuning is reduced, mode softening at a finite momentum is revealed, which provides insight towards a supersolid-like phase transition. We find that for the parameters of our system, this softening stops at a finite excitation gap and is symmetric under a sign change of the Raman detuning. Finally, using a moving barrier that is swept through the BEC, we also show the effect of the collective excitation on the fluid dynamics.
Understanding the effects of spin-orbit coupling (SOC) and many-body interactions on spin transport is important in condensed matter physics and spintronics. This topic has been intensively studied for spin carriers such as electrons but barely explored for charge-neutral bosonic quasiparticles (including their condensates), which hold promises for coherent spin transport over macroscopic distances. Here, we explore the effects of synthetic SOC (induced by optical Raman coupling) and atomic interactions on the spin transport in an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), where the spin-dipole mode (SDM, actuated by quenching the Raman coupling) of two interacting spin components constitutes an alternating spin current. We experimentally observe that SOC significantly enhances the SDM damping while reducing the thermalization (the reduction of the condensate fraction). We also observe generation of BEC collective excitations such as shape oscillations. Our theory reveals that the SOC-modified interference, immiscibility, and interaction between the spin components can play crucial roles in spin transport.
We consider a spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate with Rashba spin-orbit coupling and dipole-dipole interaction confined in a cigar-shaped trap. Due to the combined effects of spin-orbit coupling, dipole-dipole interaction, and trap geometry, the system exhibits a rich variety of ground-state spin structures, including twisted spin vortices. The ground-state phase diagram is determined with respect to the strengths of the spin-orbit coupling and dipole-dipole interaction.