Vortex-lattice dynamics in rotating spinor Bose-Einstein condensates

We observe interlaced square vortex lattices in rotating dilute-gas spinor Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC). After preparing a hexagonal vortex lattice in a one-component BEC in an internal atomic state |1, we coherently transfer a fraction of the superfluid to a different state |2. The subsequent evolution of this pseudo-spin-1/2 superfluid towards a state of offset square lattices involves an intriguing interplay of phase-separation and -mixing dynamics, both macroscopically and on the length scale of the vortex cores, and a stage of vortex turbulence. The stability of the square structure is proved by its response to applied shear perturbations. An interference technique shows the spatial offset between the two vortex lattices. Vortex cores in either component are filled by fluid of the other component, such that the spin-1/2 order parameter forms a Skyrmion lattice.     

Production of 87Rb Bose-Einstein condensates in a hybrid trap

We report a rapid evaporative cooling method using a hybrid trap which is composed of a quadrupole magnetic trap and a one-beam optical dipole trap. It contains two kinds of evaporative coolings to reach the quantum degeneracy: initial radio-frequency (RF) enforced evaporative cooling in the quadrupole magnetic trap and further runaway evaporative cooling in the optical dipole trap. The hybrid trap does not require a very high power laser such as that in the traditional pure optical trap, but still has a deep trap depth and a large trap volume, and has better optical access than the normal magnetic trap like the quadrupole-Ioffe-configuration (QUIC) cloverleaf trap. A high trap frequency can be easily realized in the hybrid trap to enhance the elastic collision rate and shorten the evaporative cooling time. In our experiment, pure Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) with about 1 × 105 atoms can be realized in 6 s evaporative cooling in the optical dipole trap.     

Spin-orbit coupled spinor Bose-Einstein condensates

An effective spin-orbit coupling can be generated in a cold atom system by engineering atom-light interactions. In this Letter we study spin-1/2 and spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates with Rashba spin-orbit coupling, and find that the condensate wave function will develop nontrivial structures. From numerical simulation we have identified two different phases. In one phase the ground state is a single plane wave, and often we find the system splits into domains and an array of vortices plays the role of a domain wall. In this phase, time-reversal symmetry is broken. In the other phase the condensate wave function is a standing wave, and it forms a spin stripe. The transition between them is driven by interactions between bosons. We also provide an analytical understanding of these results and determine the transition point between the two phases.     

Mermin-ho vortex in ferromagnetic spinor Bose-Einstein condensates

The Mermin-Ho and Anderson-Toulouse coreless vortices are demonstrated to be thermodynamically stable in ferromagnetic F = 1 spinor Bose-Einstein condensates under rotation. We have carried out extensive calculations of the Gross-Pitaevskii equations by assuming uniform density along the z axis and comparing the energies of other competing non-axis-symmetric or singular vortices. The phase diagram is thereby established in a plane of the rotation drive vs the total magnetization. Their stability is also checked by calculating collective modes based on the Bogoliubov equations.     

Collective spin tunneling in spinor Bose-Einstein condensates

We investigate a novel aspect of rotational tunneling of the macroscopic spin for multicomponent spinor Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). The Lagrangian is deduced from the multi-component BEC system formalism, and is written in terms of spin coherent states. From the effective Hamiltonian for the collective spin, the tunneling rate is obtained through a functional integral of the spin variable. It is pointed out that the cooperative effect between the Zeeman energy and the anisotropic nature of the spin-dependent inter-atomic interaction plays a key role for occurrence of collective spin tunneling.     

Exact soliton solutions of spinor Bose-Einstein condensates

We study matter-wave solitons in Bose-Einstein condensates of ultracold gaseous atoms with spin degrees of freedom and present a class of exact solutions based on the inverse scattering method. The one-soliton solutions are classified with respect to the spin states. We analyze collisional effects between solitons in the same or different spin state(s), which reveals a very interesting possibility: we can manipulate the spin dynamics by controlling the parameters of colliding solitons.     

Production of dual species Bose–Einstein condensates of ~(39)K and ~(87)Rb

We report the production of~(39) K and~(87) Rb Bose–Einstein condensates(BECs) in the lowest hyperfine states |F =1, m_F = 1 simultaneously. We collect atoms in bright/dark magneto-optical traps(MOTs) of~(39) K/~(87) Rb to overcome the light-assisted losses of~(39) K atoms. Gray molasses cooling on the D1 line of the~(39) K is used to effectively increase the phase density, which improves the loading efficiency of~(39) K into the quadrupole magnetic trap. Simultaneously, the normal molasses is employed for~(87) Rb. After the microwave evaporation cooling on~(87) Rb in the optically plugged magnetic trap,the atoms mixture is transferred to a crossed optical dipole trap, where the collisional properties of the two species in different combinations of the hyperfine states are studied. The dual species BECs of~(39) K and~(87) Rb are obtained by further evaporative cooling in an optical dipole trap at a magnetic field of 372.6 G with the background repulsive interspecies scattering length a_(KRb)= 34 a_0(a_0 is the Bohr radius) and the intraspecies scattering length a_K= 20.05 a_0.     

Spontaneous circulation in ground-state spinor dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates

We report on a study of the spin-1 ferromagnetic Bose-Einstein condensate with magnetic dipole-dipole interactions. By solving the nonlocal Gross-Pitaevskii equations for this system, we find three ground-state phases. Moreover, we show that a substantial orbital angular momentum accompanied by chiral symmetry breaking emerges spontaneously in a certain parameter regime. We predict that all these phases can be observed in the spin-1 87Rb condensate by changing the number of atoms or the trap frequency.     

Dynamics of F=2 spinor Bose-Einstein condensates

We experimentally investigate and analyze the rich dynamics in F=2 spinor Bose-Einstein condensates of 87Rb. An interplay between mean-field driven spin dynamics and hyperfine-changing losses in addition to interactions with the thermal component is observed. In particular, we measure conversion rates in the range of 10(-12) cm(3) s(-1) for spin-changing collisions within the F=2 manifold and spin-dependent loss rates in the range of 10(-13) cm(3) s(-1) for hyperfine-changing collisions. We observe polar behavior in the F=2 ground state of 87Rb, while we find the F=1 ground state to be ferromagnetic. We further see a magnetization for condensates prepared with nonzero total spin.     

Spontaneous macroscopic spin polarization in independent spinor Bose-Einstein condensates

We present experimental evidence for the spontaneous formation of a macroscopic spin polarization in overlapping regions of two independent Bose-Einstein condensates produced in different hyperfine states of 87Rb. The condensates are independent in the sense that we do not explicitly introduce a relative phase between them. A single "spin-tip" pulse maps the transverse spin polarization into longitudinal spin polarization, and the atomic density distributions are measured with a Stern-Gerlach imaging method. The resulting matter-wave interference patterns are anticorrelated.     

Bright soliton trains of trapped Bose-Einstein condensates

We variationally determine the dynamics of bright soliton trains composed of harmonically trapped Bose-Einstein condensates with attractive interatomic interactions. In particular, we obtain the interaction potential between two solitons. We also discuss the formation of soliton trains due to the quantum mechanical phase fluctuations of a one-dimensional condensate.     

How to observe dipolar effects in spinor Bose-Einstein condensates

We propose an experiment which proves the possibility of spinning gaseous media via dipolar interactions in the spirit of the famous Einstein-de Haas effect for ferromagnets. The main idea is to utilize resonances that we find in spinor condensates of alkali atoms while these systems are placed in an oscillating magnetic field. A significant transfer of angular momentum from spin to motional degrees of freedom observed on resonance is a spectacular manifestation of dipolar effects in spinor condensates.     

Spin correlation and discrete symmetry in spinor Bose-Einstein condensates

We study spin correlations in Bose-Einstein condensates of spin 1 bosons with scatterings dominated by a total spin equal 2 channel. We show that the low energy spin dynamics in the system can be mapped into an o(n) nonlinear sigma model. n = 3 at the zero magnetic field limit and n = 2 in the presence of weak magnetic fields. In an ordered phase, the ground state has a discrete Z2 symmetry and is degenerate under the group [U(1)xS(n-1)]/Z(2). We explore consequences of the discrete symmetry and propose some measurements to probe it.     

Basis-dependent dynamics of trapped Bose-Einstein condensates and analogies with semi-classical laser theory

We present a consistent second order perturbation theory for the lowest-lying condensed modes of very small, weakly-interacting Bose-Einstein condensates in terms of bare particle eigenstates in a harmonic trap. After presenting our general approach, we focus on explicit expressions for a simple three-level system, mainly in order to discuss the analogy of a single condensate occupying two modes of a trap with the semi-classical theory for two-mode photon lasers. A subsequent renormalization of the single-particle energies to include the dressing imposed by mean fields demonstrates clearly the consistency of our treatment with other kinetic approaches. Received 14 December 2001     

Quadrupole collective modes in trapped finite-temperature Bose-Einstein condensates

Finite-temperature simulations are used to study quadrupole excitations of a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate. We focus specifically on the m = 0 mode, where a long-standing theoretical problem is to account for an anomalous variation of the mode frequency with temperature. We explain this behavior in terms of the excitation of two separate modes, corresponding to the coupled motion of the condensate and the thermal cloud. The relative amplitude of the modes depends sensitively on the temperature and on the frequency of the harmonic drive used to excite them. Good agreement with experiment is found for appropriate drive frequencies.     

Magnons interaction of spinor Bose-Einstein condensates in an optical lattice

We study the interaction of magnons in dipolar spinor Bose-Einstein condensates in an optical lattice. By means of Holstein-Primakoff and Fourier transformations the energy spectra of the ground and the excited states is obtained analytically. Our results show that the collision of magnons is elastic which is expressed by the conservation of wave numbers in the process of collision. At last, we found that the interaction of magnons is attractive which tends to self-localization to form spin waves, i.e., a cluster of a macroscopic number of coherent magnons. Because of the attraction, the instability of spin wave brings about the existence of solitary wave.     

Bright solitary waves of trapped atomic Bose-Einstein condensates

Motivated by recent experimental observations, we study theoretically multiple bright solitary waves of trapped Bose-Einstein condensates. Through variational and numerical analyses, we determine the threshold for collapse of these states. Under π-phase differences between adjacent waves, we show that the experimental states lie consistently at the threshold for collapse, where the corresponding in-phase states are highly unstable. Following the observation of two long-lived solitary waves in a trap, we perform detailed three-dimensional simulations which confirm that in-phase waves undergo collapse while a π-phase difference preserves the long-lived dynamics and gives excellent quantitative agreement with experiment. Furthermore, intermediate phase differences lead to the growth of population asymmetries between the waves, which ultimately triggers collapse.     

Weakly interacting spinor Bose–Einstein condensates with three-dimensional spin–orbit coupling

Starting from the Hamiltonian of the second quantization form, the weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensate with spin-orbit coupling of Weyl type is investigated. It is found that the SU(2) nonsymmetric term, i.e., the spin-dependent interaction, can lift the degeneracy of the ground states with respect to the z component of the total angular momentum J_z, casting the ground condensate state into a configuration of zero J_z. This ground state density profile can also be affirmed by minimizing the full Gross-Pitaevskii energy functional. The spin texture of the zero J_z state indicates that it is a knot structure, whose fundamental group is π₃(M)？？？040305？？？？π₃(S²)=Z.