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arXiv:2209.13235 · Physical Review X

Ferromagnetism in an Extended Coherently Coupled Atomic Superfluid

Riccardo Cominotti, Anna Berti, Clement Dulin, C. Rogora, Giacomo Lamporesi, Iacopo Carusotto, Alessio Recati, Alessandro Zenesini, G. Ferrari

Published Jun 21, 2023• 24 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Ferromagnetism is an iconic example of a first-order phase transition taking place in spatially extended systems and is characterized by hysteresis and the formation of domain walls.We demonstrate that an extended atomic superfluid in the presence of a coherent coupling between two internal states exhibits a quantum phase transition from a paramagnetic to a ferromagnetic state.The nature of the transition is experimentally assessed by looking at the phase diagram as a function of the control parameters, at hysteresis phenomena, and at the magnetic susceptibility and the magnetization fluctuations around the critical point.We show that the observed features are in good agreement with mean-field calculations.Additionally, we develop experimental protocols to deterministically generate domain walls that separate spatial regions of opposite magnetization in the ferromagnetic state.Thanks to the enhanced coherence properties of our atomic superfluid system compared to standard condensed matter systems, our results open the way toward the study of different aspects of the relaxation dynamics in isolated coherent manybody quantum systems.

DOI
10.1103/physrevx.13.021037

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Ferromagnetism is an iconic example of a first-order phase transition taking place in spatially extended systems and is characterized by hysteresis and the formation of domain walls.We demonstrate that an extended atomic superfluid in the presence of a coherent coupling between two internal states exhibits a quantum phase transition from a paramagnetic to a ferromagnetic state.The nature of the transition is experimentally assessed by looking at the phase diagram as a function of the control parameters, at hysteresis phenomena, and at the magnetic susceptibility and the magnetization fluctuations around the critical point.We show that the observed features are in good agreement with mean-field calculations.Additionally, we develop experimental protocols to deterministically generate domain walls that separate spatial regions of opposite magnetization in the ferromagnetic state.Thanks to the enhanced coherence properties of our atomic superfluid system compared to standard condensed matter systems, our results open the way toward the study of different aspects of the relaxation dynamics in isolated coherent manybody quantum systems.
Abstract Metastability is ubiquitous in nature and is observed through the crossing of an energy barrier toward a configuration of lower energy as, for example, in chemical processes [1] or electron field ionization [2]. In classical many-body systems, metastability naturally emerges in the presence of a first-order phase transition and finds a prototypical example in supercooled vapour. In the last decades, the extension to quantum field theory and quantum many-body systems has attracted significant interest in the context of statistical physics [3, 4], protein folding [5, 6], and cosmology [7–9], where thermal and quantum fluctuations are expected to trigger the transition from the metastable state (false vacuum) to the ground state (real vacuum) via the probabilistic nucleation of spatially localized bubbles [10, 11]. However, the long-standing theoretical progress in estimating the relaxation rate of the metastable field via bubble nucleation has not yet found a counterpart in terms of experimental observations. Here we experimentally observe and characterize bubble nucleation in isolated and coherently-coupled atomic superfluids, and support our observations with numerical simulations. The agreement between our results and a novel analytic formula based on instanton theory confirms the quantum-field character of the observed decay, and promotes coherently-coupled atomic superfluids as emulators of out-of-equilibrium quantum field phenomena.
We describe the ground state of a gas of bosonic atoms with two coherently coupled internal levels in a deep optical lattice in a one-dimensional geometry. In the single-band approximation this system is described by a Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian. The system has a superfluid and a Mott insulating phase that can be either paramagnetic or ferromagnetic. We characterize the quantum phase transitions at unit filling by means of a density-matrix renormalization-group technique and compare the results with a mean-field approach and an effective spin Hamiltonian. The presence of the ferromagnetic Ising-like transition modifies the Mott lobes. In the Mott insulating region the system maps to the ferromagnetic spin-1/2 XXZXXZXXZ model in a transverse field and the numerical results compare very well with the analytical results obtained from the spin model. In the superfluid regime quantum fluctuations strongly modify the phase transition with respect to the well-established mean-field three-dimensional classical bifurcation.
The study of quantum degenerate gases has many applications in topics such as condensed matter dynamics, precision measurements and quantum phase transitions. We built an apparatus to create 87Rb Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) and generated, via optical and magnetic interactions, novel quantum systems in which we studied the contained phase transitions. For our first experiment we quenched multi-spin component BECs from a miscible to dynamically unstable immiscible state. The transition rapidly drives any spin fluctuations with a coherent growth process driving the formation of numerous spin polarized domains. At much longer times these domains coarsen as the system approaches equilibrium. For our second experiment we explored the magnetic phases present in a spin-1 spin-orbit coupled BEC and the contained quantum phase transitions. We observed ferromagnetic and unpolarized phases which are stabilized by the spin-orbit coupling’s explicit locking between spin and motion. These two phases are separated by a critical curve containing both first-order and second-order transitions joined at a critical point. The narrow first-order transition gives rise to long-lived metastable states. For our third experiment we prepared independent BECs in a double-well potential, with an artificial magnetic field between the BECs. We transitioned to a single BEC by lowering the barrier while expanding the region of artificial field to cover the resulting single BEC. We compared the vortex distribution nucleated via conventional dynamics to those produced by our procedure, showing our dynamical process populates vortices much more rapidly and in larger number than conventional nucleation.
We study the static and the dynamic response of coherently coupled two component Bose–Einstein condensates due to a spin-dipole perturbation. The static dipole susceptibility is determined and is shown to be a key quantity to identify the second order ferromagnetic transition occurring at large inter-species interaction. The dynamics, which is obtained by quenching the spin-dipole perturbation, is very much affected by the system being paramagnetic or ferromagnetic and by the correlation between the motional and the internal degrees of freedom. In the paramagnetic phase the gas exhibits well defined out-of-phase dipole oscillations, whose frequency can be related to the susceptibility of the system using a sum rule approach. In particular in the interaction SU (2) symmetric case, i.e., all the two-body interactions are the same, the external dipole oscillation coincides with the internal Rabi flipping frequency. In the ferromagnetic case, where linear response theory in not applicable, the system shows highly non-linear dynamics. In particular we observe phenomena related to ground state selection: the gas, initially trapped in a domain wall configuration, reaches a final state corresponding to the magnetic ground state plus small density ripples. Interestingly, the time during which the gas is unable to escape from its initial configuration is found to be proportional to the square root of the wall surface tension.
Using an ensemble of atoms in an optical cavity, we engineer a family of nonlocal Heisenberg Hamiltonians with continuously tunable anisotropy of the spin-spin couplings. We thus gain access to a rich phase diagram, including a paramagnetic-to-ferromagnetic Ising phase transition that manifests as a diverging magnetic susceptibility at the critical point. The susceptibility displays a symmetry between Ising interactions and XY (spin-exchange) interactions of the opposite sign, which is indicative of the spatially extended atomic system behaving as a single collective spin. Images of the magnetization dynamics show that spin-exchange interactions protect the coherence of the collective spin, even against inhomogeneous fields that completely dephase the noninteracting and Ising systems. Our results underscore prospects for harnessing spin-exchange interactions to enhance the robustness of spin squeezing protocols.
In quantum field theory, the decay of an extended metastable state into the real ground state is known as ``false vacuum decay'' and it takes place via the nucleation of spatially localized bubbles. Despite the large theoretical effort to estimate the nucleation rate, experimental observations were still missing. Here, we observe bubble nucleation in isolated and highly controllable superfluid atomic systems, and we find good agreement between our results, numerical simulations and instanton theory opening the way to the emulation of out-of-equilibrium quantum field phenomena in atomic systems.