Molecular Bose-Einstein Condensate Research Articles

An electric-field-assisted magnetic trap for cold molecular evaporative cooling: Toward molecular Bose–Einstein condensation

Ultracold molecules provide fundamental new insights into molecular interaction dynamics in the quantum regime and represent a new platform for chemical physics where quantum behaviors play a dominant role in molecular interaction and dynamics. An electric-field-assisted magnetic trap for trapping and further evaporative cooling of cold molecules to ultracold regime is proposed utilizing the perturbation of the hyperfine levels in a mixed field, and the depth of the trap can be tuned by adjusting the assisted electric field rapidly. Thus, the evaporative cooling of [Formula: see text]I[Formula: see text]Br molecules in the [Formula: see text] state of the rovibronic ground state is simulated. It shows that IBr molecules would be cooled from 26[Formula: see text][Formula: see text]K to 556[Formula: see text]nK within 598.9[Formula: see text]ms and eventually we would obtain a number of [Formula: see text] molecules in a volume of [Formula: see text][Formula: see text]cm3 with the number density of [Formula: see text][Formula: see text]cm[Formula: see text]. The Bose–Einstein condensation of the alkali diatomic molecules would probably be realized in the proposed trap if the present experimentally available samples are loaded.

Characterizing quantum gases in time-controlled disorder realizations using cross-correlations of density distributions

The role of disorder on physical systems has been widely studied in the macroscopic and microscopic world. While static disorder is well understood in many cases, the impact of time-dependent disorder on quantum gases is still poorly investigated. In our experimental setup, we introduce and characterize a method capable of producing time-controlled optical-speckle disorder. Experimentally, coherent light illuminates a combination of a static and a rotating diffuser, thereby collecting a spatially varying phase due to the diffusers’ structure and a temporally variable phase due to the relative rotation. Controlling the rotation of the diffuser allows changing the speckle realization or, for future work, the characteristic time scale of the change of the speckle pattern, i.e. the correlation time, matching typical time scales of the quantum gases investigated. We characterize the speckle pattern ex-situ by measuring its intensity distribution cross-correlating different intensity patterns. In-situ, we observe its impact on a molecular Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) and cross-correlate the density distributions of BECs probed in different speckle realizations. As one diffuser rotates relative to the other around the common optical axis, we trace the optical speckle’s intensity cross-correlations and the quantum gas’ density cross-correlations. Our results show comparable outcomes for both measurement methods. The setup allows us to tune the disorder potential adapted to the characteristics of the quantum gas. These studies pave the way for investigating nonequilibrium physics in interacting quantum gases using controlled dynamical-disorder potentials.

Instability and momentum bifurcation of a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate in a shaken lattice with exotic dispersion

Instability and momentum bifurcation of a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate in a shaken lattice with exotic dispersion

Efficient atom-molecule conversion in Bose–Einstein condensates based on nonlinear dressed-state scheme

We investigate the dynamics of atomic and molecular Bose–Einstein condensates via nonlinearly dressed states. Under the resonance-locking condition, we add a correction for an initial Hamiltonian to construct the dressed states with only second-order nonlinearity. Compared to the nonlinear stimulated Raman adiabatic passage, atomic-molecular conversion in our protocol is realized by following the dressed states instead of the dark state, thus it can produce a fast conversion passage. Furthermore, we introduce a control parameter to reduce the occupancy of the excited molecule state, and the conversion efficiency can be improved significantly by increasing the value of this parameter.

Chaos in coupled atom–molecular Bose–Einstein condensates

We investigate the chaotic dynamics of a coupled three-level atom–molecular Bose–Einstein condensate system composed by one molecular mode and two atomic modes. With the increase of atom–molecular coupling strength, we reveal the emergence of chaotic oscillations of the relative population difference between two atomic modes, which can be proven by the broad windows with a huge number of frequencies in spectral density and the chaotic trajectories in phase space diagrams. The different effects of initial states on atomic population oscillations are revealed, where for more particles in the initial state of the molecular model, chaos appears in the larger parameter region of system dynamics. Furthermore, we find that strong intermolecular interaction strength can suppress chaos resulting from strong atom–molecule coupling. This is due to the difficult transformation between atomic and molecular modes, as well as the relatively independent dynamic evolution of atoms and molecules.

Lifetime of excitations in atomic and molecular Bose-Einstein condensates

Recent experimental progress has produced Molecular Superfluids (MSF) in thermal equilibrium; this opens the door to a new class of experiments investigating the associated thermodynamic and dynamical responses. We review the theoretical picture of the phase diagram and quasiparticle spectrum in the Atomic Superfluid (ASF) and MSF phases. We further compute the parametric dependence of the quasiparticle lifetimes at one-loop order. In the MSF phase, the $U(1)$ particle number symmetry breaks to $\mathbb{Z}_2$ and the spectrum exhibits a gapless Goldstone mode in addition to a gapped $\mathbb{Z}_2$-protected atom-like mode. In the ASF phase, the $U(1)$ symmetry breaks completely, leaving behind a Goldstone mode and an unprotected gapped mode. In both phases, the Goldstone mode decays with a rate given by the celebrated Belyaev result, as in a single component condensate. In the MSF phase, the gapped mode is sharp up to a critical Cherenkov momentum beyond which it emits phonons. In the ASF phase, the gapped mode decays with a constant rate even at small momenta. These decay rates govern the spectral response in microtrap tunneling experiments and lead to sharp features in the transmission spectrum of atoms fired through molecular clouds.

Nonadiabatic dissociation of molecular Bose-Einstein condensates: Competition between chemical reactions

We provide a framework to solve generic models describing the dissociation of multiple molecular Bose-Einstein condensates in a nonadiabatic regime. The competition between individual chemical reactions can lead to non-trivial dependence on critical components such as path interference and symmetries, thus, affecting the final distribution of atomic population. We find an analytical solution for an illustrative example model involving four atomic modes. When the system parameters satisfy $CPT$ symmetry, where $C$ is charge conjugation, $P$ is parity, and $T$ is time-reversal symmetry, our solution predicts a population imbalance between atomic modes that is exponentially sensitive to system parameters. However, a weakly broken symmetry alters the population in each atomic mode and can reverse the population imbalance. Our solution also demonstrates a strong quantum correlation between atomic modes that leads to the spontaneous production of atoms in a multi-mode squeezed state. Moreover, in our framework, a time-dependent non-Hermitian quantum mechanics naturally manifests which can alternatively be realized experimentally in photonic systems.

Coherent Reaction between Molecular and Atomic Bose-Einstein Condensates: Integrable Model.

We solve a model that describes a stimulated conversion between ultracold bosonic atoms and molecules. The reaction is triggered by a linearly time-dependent transition throughout the Feshbach resonance. Our solution predicts a dependence, with a dynamic phase transition, of the reaction efficiency on the transition rate for both atoms-to-molecule pairing and molecular dissociation processes. We find that for the latter process with a linear energy dispersion of atomic modes, the emerging phase can have a thermalized energy distribution of noninteracting bosons with the temperature defined by the rate of the transition. This provides a simple interpretation of the phase transition in terms of the creation of equilibrium Bose-Einstein condensate.

Diffraction of strongly interacting molecular Bose-Einstein condensate from standing wave light pulses

We study the effects of strong inter-particle interaction on diffraction of a Bose-Einstein condensate of ^6\mathrm{Li}_26Li2 molecules from a periodic potential created by pulses of a far detuned optical standing wave. For short pulses we observe the standard Kapitza-Dirac diffraction, with the contrast of the diffraction pattern strongly reduced for very large interactions due to interaction-dependent loss processes. For longer pulses diffraction shows the characteristic for matter waves impinging on an array of tubes and coherent channeling transport. We observe a slowing down of the time evolution governing the population of the momentum modes caused by the strong atom interaction. A simple physical explanation of that slowing down is the phase shift caused by the self-interaction of the forming matter wave patterns inside the standing light wave. Simple 1D mean field simulations qualitatively capture the phenomenon, however to quantitatively reproduce the experimental results the molecular scattering length has to be multiplied by factor of 4.2. In addition, two contributions to interaction-dependent degradation of the coherent diffraction patterns were identified: (i) in-trap loss of molecules during the lattice pulse, which involves dissociation of Feshbach molecules into free atoms, as confirmed by radio-frequency spectroscopy and (ii) collisions between different momentum modes during separation. This was confirmed by interferometrically recombining the diffracted momenta into the zero-momentum peak, which consequently removed the scattering background.

Self-bound dipolar droplets and supersolids in molecular Bose-Einstein condensates

We numerically study the many-body physics of molecular Bose-Einstein condensates with strong dipole-dipole interactions. We observe the formation of self-bound droplets, and explore phase diagrams that feature a variety of exotic supersolid states. In all of these cases, the large and tunable molecular dipole moments enable the study of unexplored regimes and phenomena, including liquid-like density saturation and universal stability scaling laws for droplets, as well as pattern formation and the limits of droplet supersolidity. We discuss a realistic experimental approach to realize both the required collisional stability of the molecular gases and the independent tunability of their contact and dipolar interaction strengths. Our work provides both a blueprint and a benchmark for near-future experiments with bulk molecular Bose-Einstein condensates.

Interaction-modulated tunneling dynamics of a mixture of Bose-Fermi superfluid

In this paper, we study the interaction-modulated tunneling dynamics of a Bose-Fermi superfluid mixture, where a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with weak repulsive interaction is confined in a symmetric deep double-well potential and an equally populated two-component Fermi gas in a harmonic potential symmetrically is positioned in the center of the double-well potential. The tunneling between the two wells is modulated by fermions trapped in a harmonic potential. When the temperature is adequately low and the bosonic particle number is adequately large, we can employ the mean-field theory to describe the evolution of the BEC in the double-well potential through the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation. For the Fermi gas in the harmonic potential trap, we consider the case where the inter-fermion interaction is tuned on the deep Bose-Einstein condensate of the inter-fermion Feshbach resonance, where two fermions of spin-up and spin-down form a two-body bound state. Within the regime, the Fermi gas is well described by a condensate of these fermionic dimers, and hence can be simulated as well by a Gross-Pitaevskii equation of dimers. The inter-species interactions couple the dynamics of the two species, which results in interesting features in the tunneling oscillations. The dynamic equations of the BEC in the double-well potential is described by a two-mode approximation. Coupling it with time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation of the harmonically potential trapped molecular BEC, we numerically investigate the dynamical evolution of the Boson-Fermi hybrid system under different initial conditions. It is found that the interaction among fermions in a harmonic potential leads to strong non-linearity in the oscillations of the bosons in the double-well potential and enriches the tunneling dynamics of the bosons. Especially, it strengthens macroscopic quantum self-trapping. And the macroscopic quantum self-trapping can be expressed in three forms: the phase tends to be negative and monotonically decreases with time, the phase evolves with time, and the phase tends to be positive and increases monotonically with time. This means that it is possible the tunneling dynamics of the BEC in double-well potential is adjustable. Our results can be verified experimentally in a Bose-Fermi superfluid mixture by varying different interaction parameters via Feshbach resonance and confinement-induced resonance.

Population transfer in a nonlinear three-level Λ-system by Stark - chirped rapid adiabatic passage

We propose the use of the Stark-chirped rapid adiabatic passage (SCRAP) method to induce a complete population transfer in a nonlinear three-level Λ-type system (nl-SCRAP). We also use the nl-SCRAP method for creating stable diatomic ground molecular Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs) from atomic BECs. In this three-laser technique the pump and Stokes pulses are slightly detuned from transition frequencies, and a third strong hyperbolic-tangent laser pulse induces dynamic Stark shifts of the relevant transitions and compensates for third-order nonlinearities. If the timing of the three pulses is appropriately chosen, the nonlinear quantum system is prepared to almost complete population inversion between the two lower states in the Λ-like scheme. The paper shows that the efficiency of the nl-SCRAP is higher than the nonlinear stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (nl-STIRAP) technique, and this method can be used in one-photon as well as multi-photon transitions. The transfer process is robust concerning fluctuations of experimental parameters, such as peak Rabi frequencies, the time delay between pulses, and static detunings.

Transition from an atomic to a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate.

Molecular quantum gases (that is, ultracold and dense molecular gases) have many potential applications, including quantum control of chemical reactions, precision measurements, quantum simulation and quantum information processing1-3. For molecules, to reach the quantum regime usually requires efficient cooling at high densities, which is frequently hindered by fast inelastic collisions that heat and deplete the population of molecules4,5. Here we report the preparation of two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) of spinning molecules by inducing pairing interactions in an atomic condensate near a g-wave Feshbach resonance6. The trap geometry and the low temperature of the molecules help to reduce inelastic loss, ensuring thermal equilibrium. From the equation-of-state measurement, we determine the molecular scattering length to be + 220(±30)Bohr radii (95% confidence interval). We also investigate the unpairing dynamics in the strong coupling regime and find that near the Feshbach resonance the dynamical timescale is consistent with the unitarity limit. Our work demonstrates the long-sought transition between atomic and molecular condensates, the bosonic analogue of the crossover from a BEC to a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid in a Fermi gas7-9. In addition, our experiment may shed light on condensed pairs with orbital angular momentum, where a novel anisotropic superfluid with non-zero surface current is predicted10,11, such as the A phase of 3He.

Josephson dynamics of strongly interacting superfluid Fermi gases in double-well potentials

In this work, we study the nonlinear Josephson dynamics of Fermi superfluids in the crossover from Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid to a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in a double-well potential. Under a two-mode approximation, we derive a full two-mode (fTM) model including all interaction energy terms. By solving the fTM model numerically, we study the zero-phase and [Formula: see text]-phase modes of Josephson oscillations in the BCS–BEC crossover. We find that in the strongly interacting regime the cross interaction terms not appearing in the two-mode model cannot be easily ignored. The cross interactions can alter the behaviors of Josephson dynamics substantially, and interestingly the alterations for the zero-phase and [Formula: see text]-phase modes are just opposite.

Ultracold collisions of the lithium monoxide radical

Ultracold collisions of LiO molecules in the $^{2}\Pi_{3/2}$ ground state are considered, under the influence of either an external magnetic or electric field. Inelastic collisions are shown to be suppressed in the presence of modest laboratory strength magnetic and electric fields. The rate of elastic collisions that rethermalize the thermal distribution, and the corresponding low rate of heating state-changing collisions, suggest that quantum degeneracy or even molecular Bose-Einstein condensation of LiO gas may be attainable, provided that the initial temperatures in the milliKelvin range are achievable.

Experimental setup for the production of ultracold strongly correlated fermionic superfluids of 6Li

We present our experimental setup to produce ultracold strongly correlated fermionic superfluids made of a two-component spin-mixture of 6Li atoms. Employing standard cooling techniques, we achieve quantum degeneracy in a single-beam optical dipole trap. Our setup is capable of generating spin-balanced samples at temperatures as low as T/TF = 0.1 containing up to 5 × 10^4 atomic pairs. We can access different superfluid regimes by tuning the interparticle interactions close to a broad magnetic Feshbach resonance. In particular, we are able to explore the crossover from the molecular Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) to the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid regimes. In the near future, we plan to study different collective excitations in these superfluid samples.

Anisotropic expansions of a strongly interacting Fermi superfluid containing a vortex

We present a study of static and expansion properties of strongly interacting Fermi superfluids containing a vortex initially trapped by cylindrically symmetric potentials. Based on the order-parameter equation in the framework of the Gross–Pitaevskii equation, a unified expression for the energy of a vortex line in the crossover from a Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer superfluid to a molecular Bose–Einstein condensate is analytically presented. Numerical simulations show that the combined effects of interactions and trap configurations lead to an interesting property that the free expansion rate of the vortex core radius is smaller than that of the radius of the superfluid in the radial direction, when the strongly interacting Fermi superfluid containing a vortex is released from a cigar-shaped trap. The effects of the trap anisotropy and vortex on the Efimovian expansions of a unitary Fermi superfluid in real experimental setups are also predicted.

Interaction-induced instability and chaos in the photoassociative stimulated Raman adiabatic passage from atomic to molecular Bose-Einstein condensates

We study the effect of interactions on the conversion of atomic -to molecular Bose-Einstein condensates via stimulated Raman adiabatic passage. Both energetic instability during avoided crossings and dynamical instability during chaotic intervals limit adiabaticity and impose {\em low} sweep-rate boundaries on the efficiency of the process. For the diabatic traverse of avoided crossings, we find a reciprocal power-law dependence of the final unconverted population on sweep rate. For the traverse of chaos, we find a sharp low-rate boundary determined by the dynamical instability parameters. The interplay of these two mechanisms determines which instability controls the failure of molecular production. A judicious choice of sweep parameters is hence required to restore the process efficiency.

Nonlinear fractional stimulated Raman exact passage in three-level systems

We adapt nonlinear stimulated Raman exact passage (NL-STIREP) technique first proposed by Dorier etal. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 243902 (2017)] to fractional population transfer in configurations and extend itto nonlinear N-pod systems. We use NLF-STIRAP technique in a system and indicate that, NLF-STIREPtechnique can guide the dynamics of the system as efficiently as a NLF-STIRAP but with considerably smallerRabi frequency amplitudes. We implement NLF-STIREP technique in fractional creation of ground molecularBose-Einstein condensates (BECs) from atomic BECs and show that, this technique is robust with respect tochanges in the time delay between the pulses and pulse intensity.

Cloud shape of a molecular Bose–Einstein condensate in a disordered trap: a case study of the dirty boson problem

We investigate, both experimentally and theoretically, the static geometric properties of a harmonically trapped Bose–Einstein condensate of 6Li2 molecules in laser speckle potentials. Experimentally, we measure the in situ column density profiles and the corresponding transverse cloud widths over many laser speckle realizations. We compare the measured widths with a theory that is non-perturbative with respect to the disorder and includes quantum fluctuations. Importantly, for small disorder strengths we find quantitative agreement with the perturbative approach of Huang and Meng, which is based on Bogoliubov theory. For strong disorder our theory perfectly reproduces the geometric mean of the measured transverse widths. However, we also observe a systematic deviation of the individual measured widths from the theoretically predicted ones. In fact, the measured cloud aspect ratio monotonously decreases with increasing disorder strength, while the theory yields a constant ratio. We attribute this discrepancy to the utilized local density approximation, whose possible failure for strong disorder suggests a potential future improvement.