Spinor Condensates Research Articles

Spontaneous formation and relaxation of spin domains in antiferromagnetic spin-1 condensates

Many-body systems at low temperatures generally organize themselves into ordered phases, whose nature and symmetries are captured by an order parameter. This order parameter is spatially uniform in the simplest cases, for example the macroscopic magnetization of a ferromagnetic material. Non-uniform situations also exist in nature, for instance in antiferromagnetic materials, where the magnetization alternates in space, or in the so-called stripe phases emerging for itinerant electrons in strongly correlated materials. Understanding such inhomogeneously ordered states is of central importance in many-body physics. Here we study experimentally the magnetic ordering of itinerant spin-1 bosons in inhomegeneous spin domains at nano-Kelvin temperatures. We demonstrate that spin domains form spontaneously, that is purely because of the antiferromagnetic interactions between the atoms and in the absence of external magnetic forces, after a phase separation transition. Furthermore, we explore how the equilibrium domain configuration emerges from an initial state prepared far from equilibrium.

Observation of Wall-Vortex Composite Defects in a Spinor Bose-Einstein Condensate.

We report the observation of spin domain walls bounded by half-quantum vortices (HQVs) in a spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate with antiferromagnetic interactions. A spinor condensate is initially prepared in the easy-plane polar phase, and then, suddenly quenched into the easy-axis polar phase. Domain walls are created via the spontaneous Z_{2} symmetry breaking in the phase transition and the walls dynamically split into composite defects due to snake instability. The end points of the defects are identified as HQVs for the polar order parameter and the mass supercurrent in their proximity is demonstrated using Bragg scattering. In a strong quench regime, we observe that singly charged quantum vortices are formed with the relaxation of free wall-vortex composite defects. Our results demonstrate a nucleation mechanism for composite defects via phase transition dynamics.

Metastable hard-axis polar state of a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate under a magnetic field gradient

We investigate the stability of a hard-axis polar state in a spin-1 antiferromagnetic Bose-Einstein condensate under a magnetic field gradient, where the easy-plane spin anisotropy is controlled by a negative quadratic Zeeman energy $q<0$. In a uniform magnetic field, the axial polar state is dynamically unstable and relaxes into the planar polar ground state. However, under a field gradient $B'$, the excited spin state becomes metastable down to a certain threshold $q_{th}$ and as $q$ decreases below $q_{th}$, its intrinsic dynamical instability is rapidly recalled. The incipient spin excitations in the relaxation dynamics appear with stripe structures, indicating the rotational symmetry breaking by the field gradient. We measure the dependences of $q_{th}$ on $B'$ and the sample size, and we find that $q_{th}$ is highly sensitive to the field gradient in the vicinity of $B'=0$, exhibiting power-law behavior of $|q_{th}|\propto B'^{\alpha}$ with $\alpha \sim 0.5$. Our results demonstrate the significance of the field gradient effect in the quantum critical dynamics of spinor condensates.

Dynamics of a quenched spin-1 antiferromagnetic condensate in a harmonic trap

In this paper we consider a recent experiment [Kang et al. PRA 95 053638 (2017)] in which an antiferromagnetic spin-1 condensate of 23Na atoms was quenched from the easy-axis polar phase into the easy-plane polar phase. We simulate the phase transition dynamics using a classical field method with noisy initial conditions and find good agreement to the experimental observations. We analyse the late-time dynamics in terms of phase ordering using the nematic order parameter that we have developed in earlier work [Symes et al. PRA 96, 013602 (2017)]. We show that these experiments are able to explore the early stages of universal phase ordering where the domains grow diffusively.

Staircase in magnetization and entanglement entropy of spinor condensates

Staircases in response functions are associated with physically observable quantities that respond discretely to continuous tuning of a control parameter. A well-known example is the quantization of the Hall conductivity in two dimensional electron gases at high magnetic fields. Here, we show that such a staircase response also appears in the magnetization of spin-1 atomic ensembles evolving under several spin-squeezing Hamiltonians.We discuss three examples, two mesoscopic and one macroscopic, where the system's magnetization vector responds discretely to continuous tuning of the applied magnetic field or the atom density, thus producing a magnetization staircase. The examples that we consider are directly related to Hamiltonians that have been implemented experimentally in the context of spin and spin-nematic squeezing. Thus, our results can be readily put to experimental test in spin-1 ferromagnetic $^{87}$Rb and anti-ferromagnetic $^{23}$Na condensates.

Ferromagnetic-Core Spin Vortex of Quasi-2D Spin-1 Condensate in a Harmonic Trap

We study the ferromagnetic (FM)-core spin vortex of spin-1 condensate in a 2D harmonic trap with homogeneous magnetic field. It is shown that such a topological excitation may exist when the system stays at the easy-axis phase with the negative quadratic-Zeeman-energy parameter larger than a critical value. The exact spatial distributions of number density and local spin are obtained with a variational method. A polar ring with local spin $$ F=0$$ appears in the FM-core spin vortex. The density–density interaction can significantly affect both the spatial distribution of local spin and the position of the polar ring. The local spin in most areas is larger for the stronger ferromagnetic interaction. More interestingly, a local minimum emerges near the polar ring in the curve of total number density when the spin–spin interaction is large enough. In such easy-axis phase, the quadratic-Zeeman-energy parameter cannot control the FM-core spin vortex. An easily controlled experiment scheme is provided to realize the FM-core spin vortex.

Effective non-linear spinor dynamics in a spin-1 Bose–Einstein condensate

We derive from first principles the experimentally observed effective dynamics of a spinor Bose gas initially prepared as a Bose–Einstein condensate and then left free to expand ballistically. In spinor condensates, which represent one of the recent frontiers in the manipulation of ultra-cold atoms, particles interact with a two-body spatial interaction and a spin–spin interaction. The effective dynamics is well-known to be governed by a system of coupled semi-linear Schrödinger equations: we recover this system, in the sense of marginals in the limit of infinitely many particles, with a mean-field re-scaling of the many-body Hamiltonian. When the resulting control of the dynamical persistence of condensation is quantified with the parameters of modern observations, we obtain a bound that remains quite accurate for the whole typical duration of the experiment.

Symmetry-restoring quantum phase transition in a two-dimensional spinor condensate

Bose Einstein condensates of spin-1 atoms are known to exist in two different phases, both having spontaneously broken spin-rotation symmetry, a ferromagnetic and a polar condensate. Here we show that in two spatial dimensions it is possible to achieve a quantum phase transition from a polar condensate into a singlet phase symmetric under rotations in spin space. This can be done by using particle density as a tuning parameter. Starting from the polar phase at high density the system can be tuned into a strong-coupling intermediate-density point where the phase transition into a symmetric phase takes place. By further reducing the particle density the symmetric phase can be continuously deformed into a Bose-Einstein condensate of singlet atomic pairs. We calculate the region of the parameter space where such a molecular phase is stable against collapse.

Spinor dynamics in a mixture of spin-1 and spin-2 Bose-Einstein condensates

The spinor dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates of 87Rb atoms with hyperfine spins 1 and 2 were investigated. A technique of simultaneous Ramsey interferometry was developed for individual control of the vectors of two spins with almost the same Zeeman splittings. The mixture of spinor condensates is generated in the transversely polarized spin-1 and the longitudinally polarized spin-2 states. The time evolution of the spin-1 condensate exhibits dephasing and rephasing of the Larmor precession due to the interaction with the spin-2 condensate. The scattering lengths between spin-1 and -2 atoms were estimated by comparison with the numerical simulation using the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. The proposed technique is expected to facilitate the further study of multiple spinor condensates.

Classification of quench-dynamical behaviors in spinor condensates

Thermalization of isolated quantum systems is a long-standing fundamental problem where different mechanisms are proposed over time. We contribute to this discussion by classifying the diverse quench dynamical behaviours of spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates, which includes well-defined quantum collapse and revivals, thermalization, and certain special cases. These special cases are either nonthermal equilibration with no revival but a collapse even though the system has finite degrees of freedom or no equilibration with no collapse and revival. Given that some integrable systems are already shown to demonstrate the weak form of eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH), we determine the regions where ETH holds and fails in this integrable isolated quantum system. The reason behind both thermalizing and nonthermalizing behaviours in the same model under different initial conditions is linked to the discussion of `rare' nonthermal states existing in the spectrum. We also propose a method to predict the collapse and revival time scales and how they scale with the number of particles in the condensate. We use a sudden quench to drive the system to non-equilibrium and hence the theoretical predictions given in this paper can be probed in experiments.

Continuous-wave solutions and modulational instability in spinor condensates of positronium

We obtain general continuous-wave (CW) solutions in the model of a spinor positronium condensate in the absence of magnetic field. The CW solutions with both in-phase (n = 0) and out-of-phase (n = 1) spin components exist, with their ranges limited by the total particle density, ρ. In the limit of negligible population exchange between the spin components, the CW solutions are found to be stable or unstable, depending on the particle density of the para-positronium. Ortho-positronium, in the F = 1 spinor state, forms a ferromagnetic condensate with stable in-phase CW solutions only. Subsequent examination of the modulational instability is carried out both in the limit case of identical wavenumbers in the spin components, , and in the more general case of too. The CW solutions with n = 0 and 1 solutions, which are stable in the case of , are unstable for , for the natural repulsive sign of the nonlinearities. The total particle density, ρ, in the limit of is found to have a significant role in the stability of the condensate, which is determined by the sign of the self-interaction nonlinearity.

Entanglement Entropy of the Spin-1 Condensates at Zero Temperature.

For spin-1 condensates, the spatial degrees of freedom can be considered as being frozen at temperature zero, while the spin-degrees of freedom remain free. Under this condition, the entanglement entropy has been derived exactly with an analytical form. The entanglement entropy is found to decrease monotonically with the increase of the magnetic polarization as expected. However, for the ground state in polar phase, an extremely steep fall of the entropy is found when the polarization emerges from zero. Then the fall becomes a gentle descent after the polarization exceeds a turning point.

Polar-core spin vortex of quasi-2D ferromagnetic spin-1 condensate in a flat-bottomed optical trap with a weak magnetic field

Motivated by the recent experiments realized in a flat-bottomed optical trap (Navon et al., 2015; Chomaz et al., 2015), we study the ground state of polar-core spin vortex of quasi-2D ferromagnetic spin-1 condensate in a finite-size homogeneous trap with a weak magnetic field. The exact spatial distribution of local spin is obtained with a variational method. Unlike the fully-magnetized planar spin texture with a zero-spin core, which was schematically demonstrated in previous studies for the ideal polar-core spin vortex in a homogeneous trap with infinitely large boundary, some plateaus and two-cores structure emerge in the distribution curves of spin magnitude in the polar-core spin vortex we obtained for the larger effective spin-dependent interaction. More importantly, the spin values of the plateaus are not 1 as expected in the fully-magnetized spin texture, except for the sufficiently large spin-dependent interaction and the weak-magnetic-field limit. We attribute the decrease of spin value to the effect of finite size of the system. The spin values of the plateaus can be controlled by the quadratic Zeeman energy q of the weak magnetic field, which decreases with the increase of q.

Coarsening Dynamics of an Isotropic Ferromagnetic Superfluid.

In zero magnetic field the ground-state manifold of a ferromagnetic spin-1 condensate is SO(3) and exhibits Z_{2} vortices as topological defects. We investigate the phase-ordering dynamics of this system after being quenched into this ferromagnetic phase from a zero-temperature unmagnetized phase. Following the quench, we observe the ordering of both magnetic and gauge domains. We find that these domains grow diffusively, i.e., with domain size L(t)∼t^{1/2}, and exhibit dynamic scale invariance. The coarsening dynamics progresses as Z_{2} vortices annihilate; however, we find that at finite energy a number of these vortices persist in small clumps without influencing magnetic or gauge order. We consider the influence of a small nonzero magnetic field, which reduces the ground-state symmetry, and show that this sets a critical length scale such that when the domains reach this size the system dynamically transitions in order parameter and scaling behavior from an isotropic to an anisotropic ferromagnetic superfluid.

Adiabatic Mach–Zehnder interferometer in a dipolar spin-1 condensate

We propose and analyze a realizable scheme for performing a Heisenberg-limited Mach–Zehnder interferometry with a dipolar spin-1 condensate. Based upon adiabatic processes of sweeping the transverse magnetic field, we demonstrate a perfect phase transition, which accomplishes the beam splitter, phase shifter and recombiner as for a Mach–Zehnder interferometer. The attractive dipolar interaction ensures the existence of a path-entangled state which enhances the phase measurement precision to the Heisenberg limit. We also study the spin squeezing of the state generated in the beam splitter and show that the spin squeezing exhibits an extremum near the critical point of phase transition.

Polarization instability and the nonlinear internal Josephson effect in cavity polariton condensates generated in an excited state in GaAs microcavities of lowered symmetry

We address polarization instability in a freely decaying polariton condensate created by 2-ps-long linearly polarized laser pulses in the upper sublevel of the lower-polariton (LP) branch in a GaAs-based microcavity with reduced symmetry. The generated linearly polarized condensate is found to lose its stability at excitation densities above the threshold value: it passes into the regime of inner Josephson oscillations with strongly oscillating circular and diagonal linear polarization degrees, as well as monotonically decreased oscillations in linear polarization accompanied by a gradual increase in the condensate of the low-sublevel component. These phenomena occur with a relatively small decrease in the total polarization and spatial coherence of the spinor condensate. At high LP densities, the LP-LP interaction leads to the nonlinear Josephson effect. All effects are found to be well reproduced by the model based on spinor Gross-Pitaevskii equations. The cause of the instability was clarified by considering a simplified model of the spinor 0D oscillator: it is spin anisotropy of the LP-LP interaction. The threshold density was shown to increase with decreasing difference $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}\ensuremath{\alpha}$ of the constants of the interparticle interaction of LPs with identical and opposite spins as ${\ensuremath{\delta}}_{l}/\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}\ensuremath{\alpha}$, where ${\ensuremath{\delta}}_{l}$ is the LP level splitting. The reduction in the linear polarization is connected with the fact that the LPs escaping from the condensate with oscillating circular polarization carry off more energy than from the linearly polarized one.

Polar-Core Spin Vortex of Quasi-2D Spin-2 Condensate in a Flat-Bottomed Optical Trap**Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 11274095, the Key Scientific Research Project of Henan Province of China under Grant No. 16A140011, and the High Performance Computing Center of Henan Normal University

Motivated by the recent experiments realized in a flat-bottomed optical trap [Science 347 (2015) 167; Nat. Commun. 6 (2015) 6162], we study the ground state of polar-core spin vortex of quasi-2D spin-2 condensate in a homogeneous trap plus a weak magnetic field. The exact spatial distribution of local spin is obtained and the vortex core are observed to decrease with the growth of the effective spin-spin interaction. For the larger effective spin-spin interaction, the spatial distribution of spin magnitude in spin-2 condensate we obtained agrees well with that of spin-1 condensate in a homogeneous trap, where a polar-core spin vortex was schematically demonstrated as a fully-magnetized planar spin texture with a zero-spin core. The effective spin-spin interaction is proportional to both the bare spin-spin interaction and the radius of the homogeneous trap, simultaneously. Thus the polar-core spin vortex we obtained can be easily controlled by the radius of the trap.

Domain percolation in a quenched ferromagnetic spinor condensate

We show that the early time dynamics of easy-axis magnetic domain formation in a spinor condensate is described by percolation theory. These dynamics could be initialized using a quench of the spin-dependent interaction parameter. We propose a scheme to observe the same dynamics by quenching the quadratic Zeeman energy and applying a generalized spin rotation to a ferromagnetic spin-1 condensate. Using simulations we investigate the finite-size scaling behavior to extract the correlation length critical exponent and the transition point. We analyze the sensitivity of our results to the early-time dynamics of the system, the quadratic Zeeman energy, and the threshold condition used to define the positive (percolating) domains.

Numerical Studies of Quantum Turbulence

We review numerical studies of quantum turbulence. Quantum turbulence is currently one of the most important problems in low temperature physics and is actively studied for superfluid helium and atomic Bose--Einstein condensates. A key aspect of quantum turbulence is the dynamics of condensates and quantized vortices. The dynamics of quantized vortices in superfluid helium are described by the vortex filament model, while the dynamics of condensates are described by the Gross--Pitaevskii model. Both of these models are nonlinear, and the quantum turbulent states of interest are far from equilibrium. Hence, numerical studies have been indispensable for studying quantum turbulence. In fact, numerical studies have contributed in revealing the various problems of quantum turbulence. This article reviews the recent developments in numerical studies of quantum turbulence. We start with the motivation and the basics of quantum turbulence and invite readers to the frontier of this research. Though there are many important topics in the quantum turbulence of superfluid helium, this article focuses on inhomogeneous quantum turbulence in a channel, which has been motivated by recent visualization experiments. Atomic Bose--Einstein condensates are a modern issue in quantum turbulence, and this article reviews a variety of topics in the quantum turbulence of condensates e.g. two-dimensional quantum turbulence, weak wave turbulence, turbulence in a spinor condensate, $etc.$, some of which has not been addressed in superfluid helium and paves the novel way for quantum turbulence researches. Finally we discuss open problems.

Nematic ordering dynamics of an antiferromagnetic spin-1 condensate

We consider the formation of order in a quasi-two-dimensional (quasi-2D) anti-ferromagnetic spin-1 condensate quenched from an easy-axis (EA) to an easy-plane (EP) nematic phase. We define the relevant order parameter to quantify the spin-nematic degrees of freedom and study the evolution of the spin-nematic and superfluid order during the coarsening dynamics using numerical simulations. We observe dynamical scaling in the late time dynamics with both types of order extending across the system with a diffusive growth law. We identify half-quantum vortices (HQVs) as the relevant topological defects of the ordering dynamics, and demonstrate that the growth of both types of order is determined by the mutual annihilation of these vortices.