We observe coherent spin oscillations in an antiferromagnetic spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate of sodium. The variation of the spin oscillations with magnetic field shows a clear signature of nonlinearity, in agreement with theory, which also predicts anharmonic oscillations near a critical magnetic field. Measurements of the magnetic phase diagram agree with predictions made in the approximation of a single spatial mode. The oscillation period yields the best measurement to date of the sodium spin-dependent interaction coefficient, determining that the difference between the sodium spin-dependent s-wave scattering lengths a(f=2) - a(f=0) is 2.47+/-0.27 Bohr radii.
We characterize fluctuations in atom number and spin populations in F=1 sodium spinor condensates. We find that the fluctuations enable a quantitative measure of energy dissipation in the condensate. The time evolution of the population fluctuations shows a maximum. We interpret this as evidence of a dissipation-driven separatrix crossing in phase space. For a given initial state, the critical time to the separatrix crossing is found to depend exponentially on the magnetic field and linearly on condensate density. This crossing is confirmed by tracking the energy of the spinor condensate as well as by Faraday rotation spectroscopy. We also introduce a phenomenological model that describes the observed dissipation with a single coefficient.
Spinor Bose-Einstein condensates under external magnetic fields exhibit well-characterized spin domains of its ground state due to spin-dependent interactions. At low temperatures, collision-induced spin-mixing instabilities may promote the condensate to dwell into metastable states occurring near the phase boundaries. In this paper, we study theoretically the metastable spin-phase diagram of a spin-1 antiferromagnetic Bose-Einstein condensate at zero and finite temperatures. The approach makes use of Hartree-Fock theory and exploits the symmetry of the Hamiltonian and of the order parameters yielding a closed system of transcendental equations for the free energy, fully avoiding the use of self-consistency methods. Our results are consistent with recent experiments and allow us to explain qualitatively the different types of observed quench dynamics. In addition, we found that similar phenomena should occur in antiferromagnetic spinor condensates with a sudden change in the temperature. It is shown also that the increase in temperature induces a traceable shift of the ferromagnetic-polar transition boundary, behavior previously not noted by self-consistent mean-field calculations.
We experimentally study spin dynamics in a sodium antiferromagnetic spinor condensate as a result of spin-dependent interactions
c and microwave dressing field interactions characterized by the net quadratic Zeeman effect
qnet. In contrast to magnetic fields, microwave dressing fields enable us to access both negative and positive values of
qnet. We find an experimental signature to determine the sign of
qnet and observe harmonic spin population oscillations at every
qnet except near each separatrix in phase space where spin oscillation period diverges. No spin domains and spatial modes are observed in our system. Our data in the negative
qnet region exactly resembles what is predicted to occur in a ferromagnetic spinor condensate in the positive
qnet region. This observation agrees with an important prediction derived from the mean-field theory: spin dynamics in spin-1 condensates substantially depends on the sign of
qnet/c. This work uses only one atomic species to reveal mean-field spin dynamics, especially the remarkably different relationship between each separatrix and the magnetization, of spin-1 antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic spinor condensates.
We have experimentally investigated the quench dynamics of antiferromagnetic spinor Bose-Einstein condensates in the vicinity of a zero temperature quantum phase transition at zero quadratic Zeeman shift
q. The rate of instability shows good agreement with predictions based upon solutions to the Bogoliubov--de Gennes equations. A key feature of this work was removal of magnetic field inhomogeneities, resulting in a steep change in behavior near the transition point. The quadratic Zeeman shift at the transition point was resolved to 250 mHz uncertainty, equivalent to an energy resolution of ${k}_{B}\phantom{\rule{4pt}{0ex}}\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}$ (12 pK). A small (2--3 $\ensuremath{\sigma}$) shift of the transition point was observed, from
q=0 to
q=+650 mHz, whose physical mechanism is currently unknown. In this work, we demonstrate a sub-Hz precision measurement of a phase transition in quantum gases. It paves the way toward observing shifts of the transition point due to finite particle number
N that scale as
1/N, and also to potential Heisenberg limited spectroscopy with antiferromagnetic spinor gases [L.-N. Wu and L. You, Phys. Rev. A 93, 033608 (2016)].
This thesis discusses non-equilibrium phenomena in antiferromagnetic spinor quantum gases. We investigate, both experimentally and theoretically, the quench dynamics of antiferromagnetic spinor Bose-Einstein condensates in the vicinity of a zero temperature quantum phase transition. A microwave dressing field was used as a novel tool to access the polar to antiferrmagnetic quantum phase transition at the quadratic Zeeman shift, q=0. By performing instantaneous quenches across the phase transition,a dynamical instability was induced in the atomic cloud. This lead to pair formation and rapid amplification of spin +/-1 atoms through spin-mixing collisions. The spatial ordering kinetics in the vicinity of the phase transition was quantified by performing the local spin measurement. The coarsening dynamics was observed for the instability for q < 0, as it nucleated small domains that grew to the axial size of the cloud. Rich nonequilibrium behavior was observed in the form of growth and decay of both nematic and magnetic spin waves, following the quench. The spatiotemporal evolution was characterized through two particle correlations between atoms in each pair of spin states, which revealed dramatic differences between the dynamics of the spin correlations and those of the spin populations. \nFinally, we demonstrate the remarkable influence of linear Zeeman term on non-equilibrium dynamics of spinor Bose-Einstein condensates. We show that contrary to prior understanding magnetic field gradient actually suppresses the tendency of spin 0 state to separate into spin +/-1 state. This reconciles the Bogoliubov discrepancies and leads to a dramatic sharpening of the transition point, resulting in a resolution at the 1 Hz level. Our results point to the use of dynamics, rather than equilibrium quantities for high precision measurements of phase transitions in quantum gases.