The formation time of a condensate of fermionic atom pairs close to a Feshbach resonance was studied. This was done using a phase-shift method in which the delayed response of the many-body system to a modulation of the interaction strength was recorded. The observable was the fraction of condensed molecules in the cloud after a rapid magnetic field ramp across the Feshbach resonance. The measured response time was slow compared to the rapid ramp, which provides final proof that the molecular condensates reflect the presence of fermion pair condensates before the ramp.
The effect of a sinusoidal modulation of the interaction strength on a fermion-pair condensate is analytically studied. The system is described by a generalization of the coupled fermion-boson model that incorporates a time-dependent intermode coupling induced via a magnetic Feshbach resonance. Nontrivial effects are shown to emerge depending on the relative magnitude of the modulation period and the relaxation time of the condensate. Specifically, a nonadiabatic modulation drives the system out of thermal equilibrium: the external field induces a variation of the quasiparticle energies, and, in turn, a disequilibrium of the associated populations. The subsequent relaxation process is studied and an analytical description of the gap dynamics is obtained. Recent experimental findings are explained: the delay observed in the response to the applied field is understood as a temperature effect linked to the condensate relaxation time.
Three distinct types of behaviour have recently been identified in the two-dimensional trapped bosonic gas, namely; a phase coherent Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless-type (BKT) superfluid and normal gas phases in order of increasing temperature. In the BKT phase the system favours the formation of vortex-antivortex pairs, since the free energy is lowered by this topological defect. We provide a simple estimate of the free energy of a dilute Bose gas with and without such vortex dipole excitations and show how this varies with particle number and temperature. In this way we can estimate the temperature for cross-over from the coherent BEC to the (only) locally ordered BKT-like phase by identifying when vortex dipole excitations proliferate. Our results are in qualitative agreement with recent, numerically intensive, classical field simulations.
We report on the production of a F=1 spinor condensate of 87Rb atoms in a single beam optical dipole trap formed by a focused CO2 laser. The condensate is produced 13mm below the tip of a scanning electron microscope employing standard all-optical techniques. The condensate fraction contains up to 100,000 atoms and we achieve a duty cycle of less than 10s.
A scissors mode of a rotating Bose-Einstein condensate is investigated both theoretically and experimentally. The condensate is confined in an axi-symmetric harmonic trap, superimposed with a small rotating deformation. For angular velocities larger than $omega_perp/sqrt2 $, where $omega_perp$ is the radial trap frequency, the frequency of the scissors mode is predicted to vanish like the square root of the deformation, due to the tendency of the system to exhibit spontaneous rotational symmetry breaking. Measurements of the frequency confirm the predictions of theory. Accompanying characteristic oscillations of the internal shape of the condensate are also calculated and observed experimentally.
We present an exact Quantum Monte Carlo study of the effect of unequal masses on pair formation in Fermionic systems with population imbalance loaded into optical lattices. We have considered three forms of the attractive interaction and find in all cases that the system is unstable and collapses as the mass difference increases and that the ground state becomes an inhomogeneous collapsed state. We also address the question of canonical vs grand canonical ensemble and its role, if any, in stabilizing certain phases.