Coupled Bose Gas Research Articles

Finite-temperature ferromagnetic transition in coherently coupled Bose gases

A paramagnetic-ferromagnetic quantum phase transition is known to occur at zero temperature in a two-dimensional coherently coupled Bose mixture of dilute ultracold atomic gases provided the interspecies interaction strength is large enough. Here we study the fate of such a transition at finite temperature by performing numerical simulations with the stochastic (projected) Gross-Pitaevskii formalism, which includes both thermal and beyond mean-field effects. By extracting the average magnetization, the magnetic fluctuations and characteristic relaxation frequency (or critical slowing down), we identify a finite-temperature critical line for the transition. We find that the critical point shifts linearly with temperature and, in addition, the three quantities used to probe the transition exhibit a temperature power-law scaling. The scaling of the critical slowing down is found to be consistent with thermal critical exponents and is very well approximated by the square of the spin excitation gap at zero temperature.

Thermalization of Interacting Quasi-One-Dimensional Systems.

Many experimentally relevant systems are quasi-one-dimensional, consisting of nearly decoupled chains. In these systems, there is a natural separation of scales between the strong intrachain interactions and the weak interchain coupling. When the intrachain interactions are integrable, weak interchain couplings play a crucial part in thermalizing the system. Here, we develop a Boltzmann-equation formalism involving a collision integral that is asymptotically exact for any interacting integrable system, and apply it to develop a quantitative theory of relaxation in coupled Bose gases in the experimentally relevant Newton's cradle setup. We find that relaxation involves a broad spectrum of timescales. We provide evidence that the Markov process governing relaxation at late times is gapless; thus, the approach to equilibrium is generally nonexponential, even for spatially uniform perturbations.

Strongly interacting two-component coupled Bose gas in optical lattices

Two-component coupled Bose gas in a 1D optical lattice is examined. In addition to the postulated Mott insulator and superfluid phases, multiple bosonic components manifest spin degrees of freedom. Coupling of the components in the Bose gas leads to substantial changes in the previously observed spin phases, giving rise to a new effective spin Hamiltonian and unraveling remarkable spin correlations. The system in the absence of coupling exhibits ferromagnetic and nonferromagnetic spin phases for on-site intracomponent interaction stronger than intercomponent interaction. Upon introduction of coupling, the phase transition switches from first to second order. For comparable on-site inter- and intracomponent interactions, with coupling, instead of one, two spin phases emerge with a second-order phase transition. Exact diagonalization and variational Monte Carlo with stochastic minimization on the entangled-plaquette state bestow a unique and enhanced perspective on the system beyond the scope of a mean-field treatment.

Correlations of stripe phase in one-dimensional spin-orbit coupled Bose gas

The authors study the interplay between interaction effects and the spin-orbit induced density oscillations of the stripe phase by taking quantum fluctuations into account.

Effective triangular ladders with staggered flux from spin-orbit coupling in 1D optical lattices

Light-induced spin-orbit coupling is a flexible tool to study quantum magnetism with ultracold atoms. In this work we show that spin-orbit coupled Bose gases in a one-dimensional optical lattice can be mapped into a two-leg triangular ladder with staggered flux following a lowest-band truncation of the Hamiltonian. The effective flux and the ratio of the tunneling strengths can be independently adjusted to a wide range of values. We identify a certain regime of parameters where a hard-core boson approximation holds and the system realizes a frustrated triangular spin ladder with tunable flux. We study the properties of the effective spin Hamiltonian using the density-matrix renormalization-group method and determine the phase diagram at half-filling. It displays two phases: a uniform superfluid and a bond-ordered insulator. The latter can be stabilized only for low Raman detuning. Finally, we provide experimentally feasible trajectories across the parameter space of the SOC system that cross the predicted phase transition.

The condensation of a spin-orbit coupled Bose gas in a uniform gravitational field

In this paper, we consider the effect of a uniform gravitational field on a spin-orbit coupled Bose gas. In a semiclassical approximation, we find that the gravitational field triggers Bose-Einstein condensation at finite temperature. For weak gravitational field, the critical temperature increases as the gravitational field goes more intense. And it first increases and then decreases along with increasing spin-orbit coupling strength. The heat capacity of the Bose gas varies continuously with the temperature around the critical one, which is different from the one in cases without a spin-orbit coupling.

The effect of a finite two-photon detuning on the quantum tricriticality and phase transitions in a spin-orbit coupled Bose gas

In the current experiments, realizing the synthetic spin-orbital coupling (SOC) with ultracold atoms, a finite two-photon detuning (TPD) is present. However, in most relevant theoretical studies so far, the TPD has been assumed as zero. Here, we investigate how a finite detuning affects the ground phase diagram in a Bose gas with equal-weight Rashba and Dresselhuas SOC. We show that the single-particle dispersion relation in the presence of a finite TPD can be significantly modified compared to the case with zero detuning, which gives rise to experimentally observable effects on quantum tricriticality and phase transitions. In particular, the zero-momentum phase that can arise for a zero TPD becomes unstable against a finite TPD and disappears. Our results are relevant to the current cold atom experiments using the Raman laser-induced gauge field.

Landau criterion for an anisotropic Bose-Einstein condensate

In this work, we discuss the Landau's criterion for anisotropic superfluidity. To this end, we consider a point-like impurity moving in a uniform Bose-Einstein condensate with either interparticle dipole-dipole interaction or Raman induced spin-orbit coupling. In both cases, we find that the Landau critical velocity $v_{\rm c}$ is generally smaller than the sound velocity in the moving direction. Beyond $v_{\rm c}$, the energy dissipation rate is explicitly calculated via a perturbation approach. In the plane-wave phase of a spin-orbit coupled Bose gas, the dissipationless motion is suppressed by the Raman coupling even in the direction orthogonal to the recoil momentum. Our predictions can be tested in the experiments with ultracold atoms.

Magnetic phase transition in coherently coupled Bose gases in optical lattices

We describe the ground state of a gas of bosonic atoms with two coherently coupled internal levels in a deep optical lattice in a one dimensional geometry. In the single-band approximation this system is described by a Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian. The system has a superfluid and a Mott insulating phase which can be either paramagnetic or ferromagnetic. We characterize the quantum phase transitions at unit filling by means of a density matrix renormalization group technique and compare it with a mean-field approach. The presence of the ferromagnetic Ising-like transition modifies the Mott lobes. In the Mott insulating region the system maps to the ferromagnetic spin-1/2 XXZ model in a transverse field and the numerical results compare very well with the analytical results obtained from the spin model. In the superfluid regime quantum fluctuations strongly modify the phase transition with respect to the well established mean-field three dimensional classical bifurcation.

Phase diagram and collective modes in Rashba spin–orbit coupled BEC: Effect of in-plane magnetic field**Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 10774088).

We studied the system of pure Rashba spin–orbit coupled Bose gas with an in-plane magnetic field. Based on the mean field theory, we obtained the zero temperature phase diagram of the system which exhibits three phases, plane wave (PW) phase, striped wave (SW) phase, and zero momentum (ZM) phase. It was shown that with a growing in-plane field, both SW and ZM phases will eventually turn into the PW phase. Furthermore, we adopted the Bogoliubov theory to study the excitation spectrum as well as the sound speed.

Striped ferronematic ground states in a spin-orbit-coupledS=1Bose gas

We theoretically establish the mean-field phase diagram of a homogeneous spin-$1$, spin-orbit coupled Bose gas as a function of the spin-dependent interaction parameter, the Raman coupling strength and the quadratic Zeeman shift. We find that the interplay between spin-orbit coupling and spin-dependent interactions leads to the occurrence of ferromagnetic or ferronematic phases which also break translational symmetry. For weak Raman coupling, increasing attractive spin-dependent interactions (as in $^{87}$Rb or $^7$Li) induces a transition from a uniform to a stripe XY ferromagnet (with no nematic order). For repulsive spin-dependent interactions however (as in $^{23}$Na), we find a transition from an $XY$ spin spiral phase ($<S_{z} >= 0$ and uniform total density) with uniaxial nematic order, to a biaxial ferronematic, where the total density, spin vector and nematic director oscillate in real space. We investigate the stability of these phases against the quadratic Zeeman effect, which generally tends to favor uniform phases with either ferromagnetic or nematic order but not both. We discuss the relevance of our results to ongoing experiments on spin-orbit coupled, spinor Bose gases.

Experimental determination of the finite-temperature phase diagram of a spin–orbit coupled Bose gas

Spin-orbit (SO) coupling has led to numerously exciting phenomena in electron systems, for instance, the recently discovered topological insulator. The synthesized SO coupling with ultracold neutral atoms opens a new avenue of quantum simulation, and gives us an opportunity to study SO coupling in bosonic systems. Indeed, SO coupling leads to many new phenomena of boson superfluidity and various condensate phases that spontaneously break different symmetries. A richer structure of symmetry breaking always results in a nontrivial finite-temperature phase diagram. While the thermodynamics of the SO coupled Bose gas at finite temperature is still unknown either in theory or experiment. In this work, we experimentally generate the SO coupling in ultracold Rb-87 gas to explore in a large temperature range and get most key features. We discover a novel phase transition between the stripe ordered phase and the magnetized phase, which is reminiscent of temperature-driven transition from the B phase to the A phase in super- fluid Helium-3 and from spin-density-wave to spin nematic transition in iron pnictide. We also observe that the magnetic phase transition and the Bose condensate transition occur simultaneously as temperature decreases. Our work determines the entire finite-temperature phase diagram of SO coupled Bose gas and further demonstrate the power of quantum simulation.

Spin-Orbit Coupled Weakly Interacting Bose-Einstein Condensates in Harmonic Traps

We investigate theoretically the phase diagram of a spin-orbit coupled Bose gas in two-dimensional harmonic traps. We show that at strong spin-orbit coupling the single-particle spectrum decomposes into different manifolds separated by ℏω{⊥}, where ω{⊥} is the trapping frequency. For a weakly interacting gas, quantum states with Skyrmion lattice patterns emerge spontaneously and preserve either parity symmetry or combined parity-time-reversal symmetry. These phases can be readily observed in a spin-orbit coupled gas of ^{87}Rb atoms in a highly oblate trap.

Dilute Fermi gas in quasi-one-dimensional traps: from weakly interacting fermions via hard core bosons to a weakly interacting Bose gas.

We study equilibrium properties of a cold two-component Fermi gas confined in a quasi-one-dimensional trap of the transverse size l(perpendicular). In the dilute limit (nl(perpendicular)<<1, where n is the 1D density) the problem is exactly solvable for an arbitrary 3D fermionic scattering length aF. When l(perpendicular)/aF goes from -infinity to +infinity, the system successively passes three regimes: weakly interacting Fermi gas, hard core Bose gas, and weakly coupled Bose gas. The regimes are separated by two crossovers at aF approximately +/-nl2(perpendicular). In conclusion, we discuss experimental implications of these results.