Defect Saturation in a Rapidly Quenched Bose Gas

Abstract

We investigate the saturation of defect density in an atomic Bose gas rapidly cooled into a superfluid phase. The number of quantum vortices, which are spontaneously created in the quenched gas, exhibits a Poissonian distribution not only for a slow quench in the Kibble-Zurek (KZ) scaling regime but also for a fast quench, in which case the mean vortex number is saturated. This shows that the saturation is not caused by destructive vortex collisions, but by the early-time coarsening in an emerging condensate, which is further supported by the observation that the condensate growth lags the quenching in the saturation regime. Our results demonstrate that the defect saturation is an effect beyond the KZ mechanism, opening a path for studying critical phase transition dynamics using the defect number distribution.