Ultra-cold spinor Bose gases present rich physics due to the special combination of superfluidity and magnetism in a quantum system. This system was first realized in 1998 by confining a Bose-Einstein condensate in an all-optical trap.\nIn this thesis, we consider the fluctuations of observable quantities in a spin-1 Bose gas. Understanding how fluctuations arise due to the spin excitations of the condensate is important because it offers an insight into how measurement noise reveals the many-body physics of the system.\nTo begin, we present the mean-field and Bogoliubov theory of a uniform spin-1 Bose gas subject to a constant magnetic field, describing the condensate and its low-energy collective excitations.\nWe then develop a formalism to describe the fluctuations in a general density-like observable. We start from the two-point correlation function and cast it in the form of a generalised static structure factor determined by the three Bogoliubov quasiparticle excitation branches. We derive analytic results for the fluctuation amplitudes and the temperature-dependent static structure factors for observables of total density and the three spin densities.\nFor all four magnetic phases, we analyse the spinor order parameter and quasiparticle spectra while numerically mapping out the fluctuation amplitudes and static structure factors for the total and spin density operators.\nWe describe the fluctuations in experimental measurements made within finite cells, which is an important step to making meaningful predictions for experiments. We consider cylindrical cells and gaussian cells as two limiting cases. We apply this analysis to an experimentally realisable system of a quasi-2D spinor gas in a harmonic trap, comparing extensive numeric results with analytic limits.
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 theory for the number fluctuations of a quasi-two-dimensional (quasi-2D) dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate measured with finite resolution cells. We show that when the dipoles are tilted to have a component parallel to the plane of the trap, the number fluctuations become anisotropic, i.e., depend on the in-plane orientation of the measurement cell. We develop analytic results for the quantum and thermal fluctuations applicable to the cell sizes accessible in experiments. We show that as cell size is increased the thermodynamic fluctuation result is approached much more slowly than in condensates with short range interactions, so experiments would not require high numerical aperture imaging to observe the predicted effect.
We consider the total density and spin density fluctuations of a uniform spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate within the Bogoliubov formalism. We present results for the total density and spin density static structure factors for all four magnetic phases. A key result of our work is a set of analytic predictions for the structure factors in the large- and small-momentum limits. These results will be useful in current experiments aiming to develop a better understanding of the excitations and fluctuations of spinor condensates.
We consider the fluctuations in atom number that occur within finite-sized measurement cells in a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate. These approximate the fluctuation measurements made in current experiments with finite-resolution in situ imaging. A numerical scheme is developed to calculate these fluctuations using the quasiparticle modes of a cylindrically symmetric three-dimensionally trapped condensate with either contact or dipole-dipole interactions. We use this scheme to study the properties of a pancake-shaped condensate using cylindrical cells. The extension of the theory to washer-shaped cells with azimuthal weighting is made and used to discriminate between the low-energy roton modes in a dipolar condensate according to their projection of angular momentum. Our results are based on the Bogoliubov approach valid for zero and small finite temperatures.
Bose-Einstein condensates of quasiparticles such as exciton-polaritons, magnons and massive photons allow for new experimental possibilities as compared to the atomic Bose-Einstein condensates. In this Thesis we focus on a condensate of photons, first created at Bonn University in 2010. One of the recent achievements is the measurement of number fluctuations in such a condensate of photons. We present a general theory to calculate these number fluctuations in a harmonically trapped interacting Bose gas and apply this to the available experimental results on the condensate of photons, finding good quantitative agreement. Additionally, we investigate the fundamental phenomenon of phase diffusion, which is based on the fact that a Bose-Einstein condensate can be described as a symmetry-broken phase. However, the symmetry-broken phase is only well defined in the thermodynamic limit, such that in a finite system the phase of the Bose-Einstein condensate can have nontrivial dynamics. We propose a new type of interference experiment involving a condensate of photons to measure this dynamical behavior of the phase. By calculating the effects of quantum and thermal fluctuations we find different time scales on which the interference pattern vanishes. Based on these time scales, we conclude that phase diffusion is experimentally observable within the precision of current devices.