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arXiv:1512.06791 · New Journal of Physics

Vortex dynamics in superfluids governed by an interacting gauge theory

Salvatore Butera, Manuel Valiente, Patrik Öhberg

Published Aug 2, 2016• 18 citations
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Abstract

We study the dynamics of a vortex in a quasi two-dimensional Bose gas consisting of light-matter coupled atoms forming two-component pseudo spins. The gas is subject to a density dependent gauge potential, hence governed by an interacting gauge theory, which stems from a collisionally induced detuning between the incident laser frequency and the atomic energy levels. This provides a back-action between the synthetic gauge potential and the matter field. A Lagrangian approach is used to derive an expression for the force acting on a vortex in such a gas. We discuss the similarities between this force and the one predicted by Iordanskii, Lifshitz and Pitaevskii when scattering between a superfluid vortex and the thermal component is taken into account.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/18/8/085001

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We study the dynamics of a vortex in a quasi two-dimensional Bose gas consisting of light-matter coupled atoms forming two-component pseudo spins. The gas is subject to a density dependent gauge potential, hence governed by an interacting gauge theory, which stems from a collisionally induced detuning between the incident laser frequency and the atomic energy levels. This provides a back-action between the synthetic gauge potential and the matter field. A Lagrangian approach is used to derive an expression for the force acting on a vortex in such a gas. We discuss the similarities between this force and the one predicted by Iordanskii, Lifshitz and Pitaevskii when scattering between a superfluid vortex and the thermal component is taken into account.
Abstract We consider a two-dimensional weakly interacting ultracold Bose gas whose constituents are two-level atoms. We study the effects of a synthetic density-dependent gauge field that arises from laser–matter coupling in the adiabatic limit with a laser configuration such that the single-particle zeroth-order vector potential corresponds to a constant synthetic magnetic field. We find a new exotic type of current nonlinearity in the Gross–Pitaevskii equation which affects the dynamics of the order parameter of the condensate. We investigate the rotational properties of this system in the Thomas–Fermi limit, focusing in particular on the physical conditions that make the existence of a quantized vortex in the system energetically favourable with respect to the non-rotating solution. We point out that two different physical interpretations can be given to this new nonlinearity: firstly it can be seen as a local modification of the mean field coupling constant, whose value depends on the angular momentum of the condensate. Secondly, it can be interpreted as a density modulated angular velocity given to the cloud. Looking at the problem from both of these viewpoints, we show that the effect of the new nonlinearity is to induce a rotation to the condensate, where the transition from non-rotating to rotating states depends on the density of the cloud.
We show how density dependent gauge potentials can be induced in dilute gases of ultracold atoms using light-matter interactions. We study the effect of the resulting interacting gauge theory and show how it gives rise to novel topological states in the ultracold gas. We find in particular that the onset of persistent currents in a ring geometry is governed by a critical number of particles. The density-dependent gauge potential is also found to support chiral solitons in a quasi-one-dimensional ultracold Bose gas.
We propose a scheme to generate an Abelian gauge field in an atomic gas using two crossed laser beams. If the internal atomic state follows adiabatically the eigenstates of the atom-laser interaction, Berry's phase gives rise to a vector potential that can nucleate vortices in a Bose gas. The present scheme operates even for a large detuning with respect to the atomic resonance, making it applicable to alkali-metal atoms without significant heating due to spontaneous emission. We test the validity of the adiabatic approximation by integrating the set of coupled Gross-Pitaevskii equations associated with the various internal atomic states, and we show that the steady state of the interacting gas indeed exhibits a vortex lattice, as expected from the adiabatic gauge field.
An alternative approach to the derivation of the force on a vortex based in an adiabatic approximation in the action of the superfluid system is developed. Assuming that the vortex motion is relatively slow compared with the characteristic times involved in the microscopic degrees of freedom, the effect of the superfluid and its excitations is reduced to a gauge potential, and the associated transverse force. The vortex velocity part of the transverse force is found in terms of the thermal expectation of the angular momentum of the fluid around the vortex. The excitations countercirculate the vortex reducing the effective density to that of the superfluid part only. Non-adiabatic contributions appear in this formalism as a non-Abelian gauge potential connecting different microscopic states, in particular the renormalization of the vortex mass is given by the lowest order diagonal correction to the adiabatic theory, and the long wavelength contributions found to depend only on the static structure factor for the fluid.
Gauge fields are ubiquitous in modern quantum physics. In superfluids, quantized vortices can be induced by gauge fields. Here we demonstrate the first experimental observation of vortex nucleations in light-dressed spinor Bose-Einstein condensates under radially localized synthetic magnetic fields. The light-induced spin-orbital-angular-momentum coupling creates azimuthal gauge potentials A[over →] for the lowest-energy spinor branch dressed eigenstate. The observation of the atomic wave function in the lowest-energy dressed eigenstate reveals that vortices nucleate from the cloud center of a vortex-free state with canonical momentum p[over →]=0. This is because a large circulating azimuthal velocity field ∝p[over →]-A[over →] at the condensate center results in a dynamically unstable localized excitation that initiates vortex nucleations. Furthermore, the long-time dynamics to reach the ground state stops in a metastable state when |A[over →]| is not sufficiently large. Our observation has reasonable agreement with the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii simulations.
We experimentally and numerically study the collapse dynamics of a quantum vortex in a two-dimensional atomic superfluid following a fast interaction ramp from repulsion to attraction. We find the conditions and timescales for a superfluid vortex to radially converge into a quasistationary density profile, demonstrating the spontaneous formation of a vortex solitonlike structure in an atomic Bose gas. We record an emergent self-similar dynamics caused by an azimuthal modulational instability, which amplifies initial density perturbations and leads to the eventual splitting of a solitonic ring profile or direct fragmentation of a superfluid into disordered, but roughly circular arrays of Townes solitonlike wave packets. These dynamics are qualitatively reproduced by simulations based on the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. However, a discrepancy in the magnitude of amplified density fluctuations predicted by our mean-field analysis suggests the presence of effects beyond the mean-field approximation. Our study sets the stage for exploring out-of-equilibrium dynamics of vortex quantum matter quenched to attractive interactions and their universal characteristics.