Quantum phases of vortices in rotating Bose-Einstein condensates

We investigate the ground states of weakly interacting bosons in a rotating trap as a function of the number of bosons, N, and the average number of vortices, N(V). We identify the filling fraction nu identical with N/N(V) as the parameter controlling the nature of these states. We present results indicating that, as a function of nu, there is a zero temperature phase transition between a triangular vortex lattice phase, and strongly correlated vortex liquid phases. The vortex liquid phases appear to be the Read-Rezayi parafermion states.     

Ultracold atoms in a disordered crystal of light: towards a bose glass

We use a bichromatic optical lattice to experimentally realize a disordered system of ultracold strongly interacting 87Rb bosons. In the absence of disorder, the atoms are pinned by repulsive interactions in the sites of an ideal optical crystal, forming one-dimensional Mott-insulator states. We measure the excitation spectrum of the system as a function of disorder strength and characterize its phase-coherence properties with a time-of-flight technique. Increasing disorder, we observe a broadening of the Mott-insulator resonances and the transition to a state with vanishing long-range phase coherence and a flat density of excitations, which suggest the formation of a Bose-glass phase.     

Solitons in Bose–Einstein condensates

The Gross–Pitaevskii equation (GPE) describing the evolution of the Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) order parameter for weakly interacting bosons supports dark solitons for repulsive interactions and bright solitons for attractive interactions. After a brief introduction to BEC and a general review of GPE solitons, we present our results on solitons that arise in the BEC of hard-core bosons, which is a system with strongly repulsive interactions. For a given background density, this system is found to support both a dark soliton and an antidark soliton (i.e., a bright soliton on a pedestal) for the density profile. When the background has more (less) holes than particles, the dark (antidark) soliton solution dies down as its velocity approaches the sound velocity of the system, while the antidark (dark) soliton persists all the way up to the sound velocity. This persistence is in contrast to the behaviour of the GPE dark soliton, which dies down at the Bogoliubov sound velocity. The energy–momentum dispersion relation for the solitons is shown to be similar to the exact quantum low-lying excitation spectrum found by Lieb for bosons with a delta-function interaction.     

Condensation of N interacting bosons: a hybrid approach to condensate fluctuations

We present a new method of calculating the distribution function and fluctuations for a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of N interacting atoms. The present formulation combines our previous master equation and canonical ensemble quasiparticle techniques. It is applicable both for ideal and interacting Bogoliubov BEC and yields remarkable accuracy at all temperatures. For the interacting gas of 200 bosons in a box we plot the temperature dependence of the first four central moments of the condensate particle number and compare the results with the ideal gas. For the interacting mesoscopic BEC, as with the ideal gas, we find a smooth transition for the condensate particle number as we pass through the critical temperature.     

强耦合腔-QED系统中原子的纳秒脉冲激发光谱研究

本文在多原子强耦合腔-QED系统中,利用脉冲宽度为5 ns的强脉冲光在垂直于腔轴方向直接激发原子,脉冲的峰值功率为40 mW,通过光学腔观测激发原子辐射到腔中的光子获得相应的激发光谱。我们发现当光场频率和原子跃迁失谐±80 MHz时原子激发率达到最大,而在共振时原子激发被抑制。我们建立了脉冲光与三能级原子相互作用的模型,通过缀饰态能够解释此现象。     

Conical intersections in an ultracold gas

We find that energy surfaces of more than two atoms or molecules interacting via transition dipole-dipole potentials generically possess conical intersections (CIs). Typically only few atoms participate strongly in such an intersection. For the fundamental case, a circular trimer, we show how the CI affects adiabatic excitation transport via electronic decoherence or geometric phase interference. These phenomena may be experimentally accessible if the trimer is realized by light alkali atoms in a ring trap, whose interactions are induced by off-resonant dressing with Rydberg states. Such a setup promises a direct probe of the full many-body density dynamics near a CI.     

Superfluid-insulator transition in a moving system of interacting bosons

We analyze the stability of superfluid currents in a system of strongly interacting ultracold atoms in an optical lattice. We show that such a system undergoes a dynamic, irreversible phase transition at a critical phase gradient that depends on the interaction strength between atoms. At commensurate filling, the phase boundary continuously interpolates between the classical modulation instability of a weakly interacting condensate and the equilibrium quantum phase transition into a Mott insulator state at which the critical current vanishes. We argue that quantum fluctuations smear the transition boundary in low dimensional systems. Finally we discuss the implications to realistic experiments.     

Glassy behavior in a binary atomic mixture

We experimentally study one-dimensional, lattice-modulated Bose gases in the presence of an uncorrelated disorder potential formed by localized impurity atoms, and compare to the case of correlated quasidisorder formed by an incommensurate lattice. While the effects of the two disorder realizations are comparable deeply in the strongly interacting regime, both showing signatures of Bose-glass formation, we find a dramatic difference near the superfluid-to-insulator transition. In this transition region, we observe that random, uncorrelated disorder leads to a shift of the critical lattice depth for the breakdown of transport as opposed to the case of correlated quasidisorder, where no such shift is seen. Our findings, which are consistent with recent predictions for interacting bosons in one dimension, illustrate the important role of correlations in disordered atomic systems.     

Exponentially decaying correlations in a gas of strongly interacting spin-polarized 1D fermions with zero-range interactions

We consider the single-particle correlations and momentum distributions in a gas of strongly interacting, spinless 1D fermions with zero-range interactions. This system represents a fermionic version of the Tonks-Girardeau gas of impenetrable bosons as it can be mapped to a system of noninteracting 1D bosons. We use this duality to show that the T = 0, single-particle correlations exhibit an exponential decay with distance. This strongly interacting system is experimentally accessible using ultracold atoms and has a Lorentzian momentum distribution at large momenta whose width is given by the linear density.     

Optical Bragg,atomic Bragg and cavity QED detections of quantum phases and excitation spectra of ultracold atoms in bipartite and frustrated optical lattices

Ultracold atoms loaded on optical lattices can provide unprecedented experimental systems for the quantum simulations and manipulations of many quantum phases and quantum phase transitions between these phases. However, so far, how to detect these quantum phases and phase transitions effectively remains an outstanding challenge. In this paper, we will develop a systematic and unified theory of using the optical Bragg scattering, atomic Bragg scattering or cavity QED to detect the ground state and the excitation spectrum of many quantum phases of interacting bosons loaded in bipartite and frustrated optical lattices. The physically measurable quantities of the three experiments are the light scattering cross sections, the atom scattered clouds and the cavity leaking photons respectively. We show that the two photon Raman transition processes in the three detection methods not only couple to the density order parameter, but also the valence bond order parameter due to the hopping of the bosons on the lattice. This valence bond order coupling is very sensitive to any superfluid order or any valence bond (VB) order in the quantum phases to be probed. These quantum phases include not only the well-known superfluid and Mott insulating phases, but also other important phases such as various kinds of charge density waves (CDW), valence bond solids (VBS), and CDW-VBS phases with both CDW and VBS orders unique to frustrated lattices, and also various kinds of supersolids. We analyze respectively the experimental conditions of the three detection methods to probe these various quantum phases and their corresponding excitation spectra. We also address the effects of a finite temperature and a harmonic trap. We contrast the three scattering methods with recent in situ measurements inside a harmonic trap and argue that the two kinds of measurements are complementary to each other. The combination of both kinds of detection methods could be used to match the combination of Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), the Angle Resolved Photo Emission spectroscopy (ARPES) and neutron scattering in condensed matter systems, therefore achieve the putative goals of quantum simulations     

Rabi oscillations and excitation trapping in the coherent excitation of a mesoscopic frozen Rydberg gas

We demonstrate the coherent excitation of a mesoscopic ensemble of about 100 ultracold atoms to Rydberg states by driving Rabi oscillations from the atomic ground state. We employ a dedicated beam shaping and optical pumping scheme to compensate for the small transition matrix element. We study the excitation in a weakly interacting regime and in the regime of strong interactions. When increasing the interaction strength by pair state resonances, we observe an increased excitation rate through coupling to high angular momentum states. This effect is in contrast to the proposed and previously observed interaction-induced suppression of excitation, the so-called dipole blockade.     

Collective excitations of a degenerate gas at the BEC-BCS crossover

We study collective excitation modes of a fermionic gas of (6)Li atoms in the BEC-BCS crossover regime. While measurements of the axial compression mode in the cigar-shaped trap close to a Feshbach resonance confirm theoretical expectations, the radial compression mode shows surprising features. In the strongly interacting molecular BEC regime, we observe a negative frequency shift with increasing coupling strength. In the regime of a strongly interacting Fermi gas, an abrupt change in the collective excitation frequency occurs, which may be a signature for a transition from a superfluid to a collisionless phase.     

Superfluidity near phase separation in Bose-Fermi mixtures

We study the transition to fermion pair superfluidity in a mixture of interacting bosonic and fermionic atoms. The fermion interaction induced by the bosons and the dynamical screening of the condensate phonons due to fermions are included using the nonperturbative Hamiltonian flow equations. We determine the bosonic spectrum near the transition towards phase separation and find that the superfluid transition temperature may be increased substantially due to phonon damping.     

Superfluid-superfluid phase transitions in a two-component Bose-Einstein condensate

Depending on the Hamiltonian parameters, two-component bosons in an optical lattice can form at least three different superfluid phases in which both components participate in the superflow: a (strongly interacting) mixture of two miscible superfluids (2SF), a paired superfluid (PSF) vacuum, and (at a commensurate total filling factor) the super-counter-fluid (SCF) state. We study the universal properties of the 2SF-PSF and 2SF-SCF quantum phase transitions and show that (i) they can be mapped onto each other and (ii) their universality class is identical to the (d+1)-dimensional normal-superfluid transition in a single-component liquid. The finite-temperature 2SF-PSF(SCF) transitions and the topological properties of 2SF-PSF(SCF) interfaces are also discussed.     

Strongly interacting atom lasers in three-dimensional optical lattices

We show that the dynamical melting of a Mott insulator in a three-dimensional lattice leads to condensation at nonzero momenta, a phenomenon that can be used to generate strongly interacting atom lasers in optical lattices. For infinite on-site repulsion, the case considered here, the momenta at which bosons condense are determined analytically and found to have a simple dependence on the hopping amplitudes. The occupation of the condensates is shown to scale linearly with the total number of atoms in the initial Mott insulator. Our results are obtained by using a Gutzwiller-type mean-field approach, gauged against exact-diagonalization solutions of small systems.     

Realization of a strongly interacting Bose-Fermi mixture from a two-component Fermi gas

We show the emergence of a strongly interacting Bose-Fermi mixture from a two-component Fermi mixture with population imbalance. By analyzing in situ density profiles of 6Li atoms in the BCS-BEC crossover regime, we identify a critical interaction strength, beyond which all minority atoms pair up with majority atoms and form a Bose condensate. This is the regime where the system can be effectively described as a boson-fermion mixture. We determine the dimer-fermion and dimer-dimer scattering lengths and beyond-mean-field contributions. Our study realizes a gedanken experiment of bosons immersed in a Fermi sea of one of their constituents, revealing the composite nature of the bosons.     

Spin singlet mott states and evidence for spin singlet quantum condensates of spin-one bosons in lattices

We have investigated spin singlet Mott states of spin-one bosons with antiferromagnetic interactions. These spin singlet states do not break rotational symmetry and exhibit remarkably different macroscopic properties compared with nematic Mott states of spin-one bosons. We demonstrate that the dynamics of spin singlet Mott states is fully characterized by even- or odd-class quantum dimer models. The difference between spin singlet Mott states for even and odd numbers of atoms per site can be attributed to a selection rule in the low energy sectors of on-site Hilbert spaces; alternatively, it can also be attributed to an effect of Berry’s phases on bosonic Mott states. We also discuss evidence for spin singlet quantum condensate of spin-one atoms. Our main finding is that in a projected spin singlet Hilbert space, the low energy physics of spin-one bosons is equivalent to that of a Bose-Hubbard model for spinless bosons interacting via Ising gauge fields. The other major finding is spin-charge separation in some one-dimensional Mott states. We propose charge-e spin singlet superfluid for an odd number of atoms per lattice site and charge-2e spin singlet superfluid for an even number of atoms per lattice site in one-dimensional lattices. All discussions in this article are limited to integer numbers of bosons per site.