No Arabic abstract
We present a new class of electrostatics problems that are exactly solvable by adding finitely many image charges. Given a charge at some location inside a cavity bounded by up to four conducting grounded segments of spheres: if the spheres have a symmetry derived via a stereographic projection from a 4D finite reflection group, then this is a solvable generalization of the familiar problem of a charge inside a spherical cavity. There are 19 three-parametric families of finite groups formed by
Solitons are non-dispersive wave solutions that arise in a diverse range of nonlinear systems, stablised by a focussing or defocussing nonlinearity. First observed in shallow water, solitons have subsequently been studied in many other fields including nonlinear optics, biophysics, astrophysics, plasma and particle physics. They are characterised by well localised wavepackets that maintain their initial shape and amplitude for all time, even following collisions with other solitons. Here we report the controlled formation of bright solitary matter-waves, the 3D analog to solitons, from Bose-Einstein condensates of 85Rb and observe their propagation in an optical waveguide. These results pave the way for new experimental studies of bright solitary matterwave dynamics to elucidate the wealth of existing theoretical work and to explore an array of potential applications including novel interferometric devices, the study of short-range atom-surface potentials and the realisation of Schru007fodingercat states.
Strongly interacting particles in one dimension subject to external confinement have become a topic of considerable interest due to recent experimental advances and the development of new theoretical methods to attack such systems. In the case of equal mass fermions or bosons with two or more internal degrees of freedom, one can map the problem onto the well-known Heisenberg spin models. However, many interesting physical systems contain mixtures of particles with different masses. Therefore, a generalization of the recent strong-coupling techniques would be highly desirable. This is particularly important since such problems are generally considered non-integrable and thus the hugely successful Bethe ansatz approach cannot be applied. Here we discuss some initial steps towards this goal by investigating small ensembles of one-dimensional harmonically trapped particles where pairwise interactions are either vanishing or infinitely strong with focus on the mass-imbalanced case. We discuss a (semi)-analytical approach to describe systems using hyperspherical coordinates where the interaction is effectively decoupled from the trapping potential. As an illustrative example we analyze mass-imbalanced four-particle two-species mixtures with strong interactions between the two species. For such systems we calculate the energies, densities and pair-correlation functions.
The accurate modeling of the dielectric properties of water is crucial for many applications in physics, computational chemistry and molecular biology. This becomes possible in the framework of nonlocal electrostatics, for which we propose a novel formulation allowing for numerical solutions for the nontrivial molecular geometries arising in the applications mentioned before. Our approach is based on the introduction of a secondary field, $psi$, which acts as the potential for the rotation free part of the dielectric displacement field ${bf D}$. For many relevant models, the dielectric function of the medium can be expressed as the Greens function of a local differential operator. In this case, the resulting coupled Poisson (-Boltzmann) equations for $psi$ and the electrostatic potential $phi$ reduce to a system of coupled PDEs. The approach is illustrated by its application to simple geometries.
We study quench dynamics and equilibration in one-dimensional quantum hydrodynamics, which provides effective descriptions of the density and velocity fields in gapless quantum gases. We show that the information content of the large time steady state is inherently connected to the presence of ballistically moving localised excitations. When such excitations are present, the system retains memory of initial correlations up to infinite times, thus evading decoherence. We demonstrate this connection in the context of the Luttinger model, the simplest quantum hydrodynamic model, and in the quantum KdV equation. In the standard Luttinger model, memory of all initial correlations is preserved throughout the time evolution up to infinitely large times, as a result of the purely ballistic dynamics. However nonlinear dispersion or interactions, when separately present, lead to spreading and delocalisation that suppress the above effect by eliminating the memory of non-Gaussian correlations. We show that, for any initial state that satisfies sufficient clustering of correlations, the steady state is Gaussian in terms of the bosonised or fermionised fields in the dispersive or interacting case respectively. On the other hand, when dispersion and interaction are simultaneously present, a semiclassical approximation suggests that localisation is restored as the two effects compensate each other and solitary waves are formed. Solitary waves, or simply solitons, are experimentally observed in quantum gases and theoretically predicted based on semiclassical approaches, but the question of their stability at the quantum level remains to a large extent an open problem. We give a general overview on the subject and discuss the relevance of our findings to general out of equilibrium problems.
We report the observation of quantum reflection from a narrow, attractive, potential using bright solitary matter-waves formed from a 85Rb Bose-Einstein condensate. We create narrow potentials using a tightly focused, red-detuned laser beam, and observe reflection of up to 25% of the atoms, along with the trapping of atoms at the position of the beam. We show that the observed reflected fraction is much larger than theoretical predictions for a narrow Gaussian potential well; a more detailed model of bright soliton propagation, accounting for the generic presence of small subsidiary intensity maxima in the red-detuned beam, suggests that these small intensity maxima are the cause of this enhanced reflection.