Cold-atom developments suggest the prospect of measuring scaling properties and long-range fluctuations of continuous phase transitions at zero temperature. We discuss the conditions for characterizing the phase separation of Bose-Einstein condensates of boson atoms in two distinct hyperfine spin states. The mean-field description breaks down as the system approaches the transition from the miscible side. An effective spin description clarifies the ferromagnetic nature of the transition. We show that a difference in the scattering lengths for the bosons in the same spin state leads to an effective internal magnetic field. The point at which the internal magnetic field vanishes ( i.e. , equal values of the like-boson scattering lengths) is a special point. We show that the long-range density fluctuations are suppressed near that point, while the effective spin exhibits the long-range fluctuations that characterize critical points. The zero-temperature system exhibits critical opalescence with respect to long-wavelength waves of impurity atoms that interact with the bosons in a spin-dependent manner.
Cold-atom developments suggest the prospect of measuring scaling properties and long-range fluctuations of continuous phase transitions at zero temperature. We discuss the conditions for characterizing the phase separation of Bose-Einstein condensates of boson atoms in two distinct hyperfine spin states. The mean-field description breaks down as the system approaches the transition from the miscible side. An effective spin description clarifies the ferromagnetic nature of the transition. We show that a difference in the scattering lengths for the bosons in the same spin state leads to an effective internal magnetic field. The point at which the internal magnetic field vanishes ( i.e. , equal values of the like-boson scattering lengths) is a special point. We show that the long-range density fluctuations are suppressed near that point, while the effective spin exhibits the long-range fluctuations that characterize critical points. The zero-temperature system exhibits critical opalescence with respect to long-wavelength waves of impurity atoms that interact with the bosons in a spin-dependent manner.
The miscibility condition for a binary mixture of two interacting Bose-Einstein condensates is shown to be deeply affected by interaction driven thermal fluctuations. These give rise to a first order phase transition to a demixed phase with full spatial separation of the two condensates, even if the mixture is miscible at zero temperature. Explicit predictions for the isothermal compressibility, the spin susceptibility, and the phase transition temperature T_{M} are obtained in the framework of Popov theory, which properly includes beyond mean-field quantum and thermal fluctuations in both the spin and density channels. For a mixture of two sodium condensates occupying the hyperfine states |F=1⟩,|m_{F}=1⟩ and |F=1,m_{F}=-1⟩, respectively, T_{M} is predicted to occur at about 0.7 times the usual BEC critical temperature.
In this thesis, we study theoretically and in experimentally the properties of spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates with antiferromagnetic interactions realized in the ultra-cold sodium gases confined in optical dipole traps. We present in detail how to realize, diagnose and control the spinor Bose-Einstein condensates in our experiment. In order to describe the condensate, a mean-field theory is first adopted. This theory predicts a phase transition when changing the magnetic field B. The predictions of the mean-field theory agree very well with most of our experimental results, including the values of the critical magnetic field Bc, asymptotic values of n0 (relative atom number in mF=0 state) at large B and the phase diagram of n0. However, for small magnetization and small magnetic fields, we find abnormally large fluctuations (super-Poissonian) of n0. In order to describe these large fluctuations, we develop a full quantum statistical description for the spinor condensate at finite temperature. To describe uncondensed thermal atoms (also present in the same trap), we use the ``semi-ideal" Hartree-Fock approximation to deal with the interactions between the condensate atoms and the thermal ones. The experimental results lead us to introduce two kinds of temperatures, the ``spin temperature" Ts and the ``kinetic temperature" Tk with Ts≪Tk, characterizing respectively the fluctuaitons of the condensate spin and the thermal gas. We conclude that the system is reaching a quasi-equilibrium states, where different degrees of freedom reach equilibrium by separate mechanisms but where the mutual thermalization does not occur over the lifetime of the cloud.
We present a study of magnetic field induced quantum phase transitions in insulating systems. A generalized scaling theory is used to obtain the temperature dependence of several physical quantities along the quantum critical trajectory (H=HC, T→0) where H is a longitudinal external magnetic field and HC the critical value at which the transition occurs. We consider transitions from a spin liquid at a critical field HC1 and from a fully polarized paramagnet, at HC2, into phases with long range order in the transverse components. The transitions at HC1 and HC2 can be viewed as Bose-Einstein condensations of magnons which however belong to different universality classes since they have different values of the dynamic critical exponent z. Finally, we use that the magnetic susceptibility is an entanglement witness to discuss how this type of correlation sets in as the system approaches the quantum critical point along the critical trajectory, H=HC2, T→0.
The achievement in cooling alkali atomic gases, such as 87Rb, 23Na and 7Li, to quantum degeneracy opens up a way to study magnetism in spinor bosons, because these constituent atoms usually have a hyperfine spin degree of freedom. This article reviews several basic problems related to the ferromagnetic phase transition in spinor atomic Bose gases from a theoretical perspective. After a brief discussion on various possible origins of the ferromagnetic interaction, the phase diagram of the ferromagnetically coupled spinor bosons is investigated. It is found that the ferromagnetic transition occurs always above Bose-Einstein condensation and the Bose condensate is fully polarized. The low-lying collective excitations of the spinor condensate, including spin and density modes, are discussed. The spectrum of the density mode is of the Bogliubov form and the spin wave spectrum has a k2-formed dispersion relation at long wavelengths. The spin-wave stiffness coefficient contains contribut
We consider a spin-orbit coupled configuration of spin-1/2 interacting bosons with equal Rashba and Dresselhaus couplings. The phase diagram of the system at T=0 is discussed with special emphasis on the role of the interaction treated in the mean-field approximation. For a critical value of the density and of the Raman coupling we predict the occurrence of a characteristic tricritical point separating the spin mixed, the phase separated, and the zero momentum states of the Bose gas. The corresponding quantum phases are investigated analyzing the momentum distribution, the longitudinal and transverse spin polarization, and the emergence of density fringes. The effect of harmonic trapping as well as the role of the breaking of spin symmetry in the interaction Hamiltonian are also discussed.
The ground states of Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) of spin-2 bosons are classified into three distinct phases (ferromagnetic, ``antiferromagnetic,'' and cyclic) depending on the s-wave scattering lengths of binary collisions for total-spin 0, 2, and 4 channels. Many-body spin correlations and magnetic response of the condensate in each of these phases are studied in a mesoscopic regime, while low-lying excitation spectra are investigated in the thermodynamic regime. In the mesoscopic regime, where the system is so tightly confined that the spatial degrees of freedom are frozen, the exact, many-body ground state for each phase is found to be expressed in terms of the creation operators of pair or trio bosons having spin correlations. These pairwise and trio-wise units are shown to bring about some unique features of spin-2 BECs such as a huge jump in magnetization from minimum to maximum possible values and the robustness of the minimum-magnetization state against an applied magnetic field. In the thermodynamic regime, where the system is spatially uniform, low-lying excitation spectra in the presence of magnetic field are obtained analytically using the Bogoliubov approximation. In the ferromagnetic phase, the excitation spectrum consists of one Goldstone mode and four single-particle modes. In the antiferromagnetic phase, where spin-singlet ``pairs'' undergo Bose-Einstein condensation, the spectrum consists of two Goldstone modes and three massive ones, all of which become massless when magnetic field vanishes. In the cyclic phase, where boson ``trios'' condense into a spin-singlet state, the spectrum is characterized by two Goldstone modes, one single-particle mode having a magnetic-field-independent energy gap, and a gapless single-particle mode that becomes massless in the absence of magnetic field.