Formation of a vortex lattice in a rotating BCS Fermi gas

We investigate theoretically the formation of a vortex lattice in a superfluid two-spin component Fermi gas in a rotating harmonic trap, in a BCS-type regime of condensed non-bosonic pairs. Our analytical solution of the superfluid hydrodynamic equations, both for the 2D BCS equation of state and for the 3D unitary quantum gas, predicts that the vortex free gas is subject to a dynamic instability for fast enough rotation. With a numerical solution of the full time dependent BCS equations in a 2D model, we confirm the existence of this dynamic instability and we show that it leads to the formation of a regular pattern of quantum vortices in the gas.     

Coherence properties of a Bose-Einstein condensate in an optical superlattice

We study the effect of a one dimensional optical superlattice on the superfluid properties (superfluid fraction, number squeezing, dynamic structure factor) and the quasi-momentum distribution of the Mott-insulator. We show that due to the secondary lattice, there is a decrease in the superfluid fraction and the number fluctuation. The dynamic structure factor which can be measured by Bragg spectroscopy is also suppressed due to the addition of the secondary lattice. The visibility of the interference pattern (the quasi-momentum distribution) of the Mott-insulator is found to decrease due to the presence of the secondary lattice. Our results have important implications in atom interferometry and quantum computation in optical lattices.     

Thermodynamics of adiabatically loaded cold bosons in the Mott insulating phase of one-dimensional optical lattices

In this work we give a consistent picture of the thermodynamic properties of bosons in the Mott insulating phase when loaded adiabatically into one-dimensional optical lattices. We find a crucial dependence of the temperature in the optical lattice on the doping level of the Mott insulator. In the undoped case, the temperature is of the order of the large onsite Hubbard interaction. In contrast, at a finite doping level the temperature jumps almost immediately to the order of the small hopping parameter. These two situations are investigated on the one hand by considering limiting cases like the atomic limit and the case of free fermions. On the other hand, they are examined using a quasi-particle conserving continuous unitary transformation extended by an approximate thermodynamics for hardcore particles.     

Influence of global features of a Bose-Einstein condensate on the vortex velocity

We study the way in which the geometry of the trapping potential affects the vortex velocity in a Bose-Einstein condensate confined by a toroidal trap. We calculate the vortex precession velocity through a simple relationship between such a velocity and the gradient of the numerically obtained vortex energy. We observe that our results correspond very closely to the velocity calculated through time evolution simulations. However, we find that the estimates derived from available velocity field formulas present appreciable differences. To resolve such discrepancies, we further study the induced velocity field, analyzing the effect of global features of the condensate on such a field and on the precession velocity.     

Emergence of superfluid transport in a dynamical system of ultra-cold atoms

The dynamics of a Bose-Einstein condensate is studied theoretically in a combined periodic plus harmonic external potential. Different dynamical regimes of stable and unstable collective dipole and Bloch oscillations are analysed in terms of a quantum mechanical pendulum model. Nonlinear interactions are shown to counteract quantum-mechanical dephasing and lead to phase-coherent, superfluid transport.     

Mott transition in anharmonic confinement

Two effects are identified that affect the visibility of the Mott transition in an atomic gas in an optical lattice confined in a power-law potential. The transition can be made more pronounced by increasing the power law, but at the same time, experimental uncertainty in the number of particles will induce corresponding fluctuations in the measured condensate fraction. Calculations in two dimensions indicate that a potential slightly more flat-bottomed than a quadratic one is to be preferred for a wide range of particle number fluctuation size.     

Matter-wave bright solitons: Internal atomic recombination and external feeding

We consider matter-wave bright solitons in the presence of three-body atomic recombination, an axial periodic modulation and a feeding term, and use a variational method to derive conditions to have dynamically stabilized solitons due to compensation between the dissipation and alimentation of atoms from external sources. We critically examine how the BEC soliton is affected by the imbalance between the internal atom loss and external feeding. We pay special attention to study the influence of these terms on the soliton dynamics in optical lattice potentials that cause periodic modulation.     

Quantum dynamics of bosons in a double-well potential: Josephson oscillations,self-trapping and ultralong tunneling times

The dynamics of the population imbalance of bosons in a double-well potential is investigated from the point of view of many-body quantum mechanics in the framework of the two-mode model. For small initial population imbalances, coherent superpositions of almost equally spaced energy eigenstates lead to Josephson oscillations. The suppression of tunneling at population imbalances beyond a critical value is related to a high concentration of initial state population in the region of the energy spectrum with quasi-degenerate doublets. Negligible coherences among adjacent doublets result in imbalance oscillations with a very small amplitude. For unaccessible long times, however, the system recovers the regime of Josephson oscillations.     

Internal structure of a quantum soliton and classical excitations due to trap opening

We analytically solve two problems that may be useful in the context of the recent observation of matter wave bright solitons in a one-dimensional attractive atomic Bose gas. The first problem is strictly beyond mean field: from the Bethe ansatz solution we extract the internal correlation function of the particle positions in the quantum soliton, that is for a fixed center of mass position. The second problem is solved in the limit of a large number of particles, where the mean field theory is asymptotically correct: it deals with the number of excitations created by the opening of the trap, starting from a pure soliton in a weakly curved harmonic potential.     

Spatiotemporal dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates in moving optical lattices

Spatiotemporal dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates in moving optical lattices have been studied. For a weak lattice potential, the perturbed correction to the heteroclinic orbit in a repulsive system is constructed. We find the boundedness conditions of the perturbed correction contain the Melnikov chaotic criterion predicting the onset of Smale-horseshoe chaos. The effect of the chemical potential on the spatiotemporal dynamics is numerically investigated. It is revealed that the variance of the chemical potential can lead the systems into chaos. Regulating the intensity of the lattice potential can efficiently suppress the chaos resulting from the variance of the chemical potential. And then the effect of the phenomenological dissipation is considered. Numerical calculation reveals that the chaos in the dissipative system can be suppressed by adjusting the chemical potential and the intensity of the lattice potential.     

Finite number of vortices and bending of finite vortex lines in a confined rotating Bose-Einstein condensate

The minimal energy configurations of finite N_v-body vortices in a rotating trapped Bose-Einstein condensate is studied analytically by extending the previous work [Y. Castin, R. Dum, Eur. Phys. J. D 7, 399 (1999)], and taking into account the finite size effects on z-direction and the bending of finite vortex lines. The calculation of the energy of the vortices as a function of the rotation frequency of the trap gives number, curvature, configuration of vortices and width of vortex cores self-consistently. The numerical results show that (1) the simplest regular polynomial of the several vortex configurations is energetically favored; while the hexagonal vortex lattice is more stable than square lattice; (2) bending is more stable then straight vortex line along the z-axis for λ<1; (3) the boundary effect is obvious: compared with the estimation made under infinite boundary, the finite size effect leads to a lower vortex density, while the adding vortex bending results in a less higher density because of the expansion. The results are in well agreement with the other authors' ones.     

Effect of the lattice alignment on Bloch oscillations of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a square optical lattice

We consider a Bose-Einstein condensate of ultracold atoms loaded into a square optical lattice and subject to a static force. For vanishing atom-atom interactions the atoms perform periodic Bloch oscillations for arbitrary direction of the force. We study stability of these oscillations for non-vanishing interactions, which is shown to depend on an alignment of the force vector with respect to the lattice crystallographic axes. If the force is aligned along any of the axes, the mean field approach can be used to identify the stability conditions. On the contrary, for a misaligned force one has to employ the microscopic approach, which predicts periodic modulation of Bloch oscillations in the limit of a large forcing.     

Lattice bosons in quartic confinement

We present a theoretical study of bose condensation of non-interacting bosons in finite lattices in quartic potentials in one, two, and three dimensions. We investigate dimensionality effects and quartic potential effects on single boson density of energy states, condensation temperature, condensate fraction, and specific heat. The results obtained are compared with corresponding results for lattice bosons in harmonic traps.     

Quantum dynamics of repulsively bound atom pairs in the Bose-Hubbard model

We investigate the quantum dynamics of repulsively bound atom pairs in an optical lattice described by the periodic Bose-Hubbard model both analytically and numerically. In the strongly repulsive limit, we analytically study the dynamical problem by the perturbation method with the hopping terms treated as a perturbation. For a finite-size system, we numerically solve the dynamic problem in the whole regime of interaction by the exact diagonalization method. Our results show that the initially prepared atom pairs are dynamically stable and the dissociation of atom pairs is greatly suppressed when the strength of the on-site interaction is much greater than the tunneling amplitude, i.e., the strongly repulsive interaction induces a self-localization phenomenon of the atom pairs.     

Studies of bosons in optical lattices in a harmonic potential

We present a theoretical study of Bose condensation and specific heat of non-interacting bosons in finite lattices in harmonic potentials in one, two, and three dimensions. We numerically diagonalize the Hamiltonian to obtain the energy levels of the systems. Using the energy levels thus obtained, we investigate the temperature dependence, dimensionality effects, lattice size dependence, and evolution to the bulk limit of the condensate fraction and the specific heat. Some preliminary results on the specific heat of fermions in optical lattices are also presented. The results obtained are contextualized within the current experimental and theoretical scenario.     

On the critical point of an interacting two-dimensional trapped Bose gas

We consider a quantized vortex excitation in a two-dimensional, harmonically trapped Bose gas and derive an equation for the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition temperature based on a simple free-energy argument. We relate the critical phase-space density at the transition to the ratio between the entropy gain and the corresponding cost in energy of creating a free vortex excitation in the system.     

Slowly moving matter-wave gap soliton propagation in weak random optical lattices

We systematically investigate slowly moving matter-wave gap soliton propagation in weak random optical lattices. With the weak randomness, an effective-particle theory is constructed to show that the motion of a gap soliton is similar to a particle moving in random potentials. Based on the effective-particle theory, the effects of the randomness on gap solitons are obtained and the trajectories of gap solitons are well predicted. Moreover, the general laws that describe the movement depending on the weak randomness are obtained. We find that with an increase of the random strength, the ensemble-average velocity reduces slowly and the reflection probability becomes larger. The theoretical results based on the effective-particle theory are confirmed by the numerical simulations based on the Gross-Pitaevskii equation.     

Collective excitations of harmonically trapped ideal gases

We theoretically study the collective excitations of an ideal gas confined in an isotropic harmonic trap. We give an exact solution to the Boltzmann-Vlasov equation; as expected for a single-component system, the associated mode frequencies are integer multiples of the trapping frequency. We show that the expressions found by the scaling ansatz method are a special case of our solution. Our findings are most useful in case the trap contains more than one phase: we demonstrate how to obtain the oscillation frequencies in case an interface is present between the ideal gas and a different phase.     

Multidimensional semi-gap solitons in a periodic potential

The existence, stability and other dynamical properties of a new type of multi-dimensional (2D or 3D) solitons supported by a transverse low-dimensional (1D or 2D, respectively) periodic potential in the nonlinear Schr?dinger equation with the self-defocusing cubic nonlinearity are studied. The equation describes propagation of light in a medium with normal group-velocity dispersion (GVD). Strictly speaking, solitons cannot exist in the model, as its spectrum does not support a true bandgap. Nevertheless, the variational approximation (VA) and numerical computations reveal stable solutions that seem as completely localized ones, an explanation to which is given. The solutions are of the gap-soliton type in the transverse direction(s), in which the periodic potential acts in combination with the diffraction and self-defocusing nonlinearity. Simultaneously, in the longitudinal (temporal) direction these are ordinary solitons, supported by the balance of the normal GVD and defocusing nonlinearity. Stability of the solitons is predicted by the VA, and corroborated by direct simulations.     

Anderson localization of elementary excitations in a one-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate

We study the elementary excitations of a transversely confined Bose-Einstein condensate in presence of a weak axial random potential. We determine the localization length (i) in the hydrodynamical low energy regime, for a domain of linear densities ranging from the Tonks-Girardeau to the transverse Thomas-Fermi regime, in the case of a white noise potential and (ii) for all the range of energies, in the “one-dimensional mean field regime”, in the case where the randomness is induced by a series of randomly placed point-like impurities. We discuss our results in view of recent experiments in elongated BEC systems.