It is shown that a vortex can be continuously created in a Bose-Einstein condensate with hyperfine spin F=2 in a Ioffe-Pritchard trap by reversing the axial magnetic field adiabatically. It may be speculated that the condensate cannot be confined in the trap since the weak-field seeking state makes transitions to the neutral and the strong-field seeking states due to the degeneracy of these states along the vortex axis when the axial field vanishes. We have solved the Gross-Pitaevskii equation numerically with given external magnetic fields to show that this is not the case. It is shown that a considerable fraction of the condensate remains in the trap even when the axial field is reversed rather slowly. This scenario is also analysed in the presence of an optical plug along the vortex axis. Then the condensate remains within the
Fz=2 manifold, with respect to the local magnetic field, throughout the formation of a vortex and hence the loss of atoms does not take place.
It has been shown that a vortex in a Bose-Einstein condensate with spin degrees of freedom can be created by manipulating with external magnetic fields. In the previous work [Phys. Rev. A 61, 063610 (2000)] an optical plug along the vortex axis has been introduced to avoid Majorana flips, which take place when the external magnetic field vanishes along the vortex axis while it is created. In the present work, in contrast, we study the same scenario without introducing the optical plug. The magnetic field vanishes only in the center of the vortex at a certain moment of the evolution and hence we expect that the system will lose only a fraction of the atoms by Majorana flips even in the absence of an optical plug. Our conjecture is justified by numerically solving the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, where the full spinor degrees of freedom of the order parameter are properly taken into account. A significant simplification of the experimental realization of the scenario is attained by the omission of the optical plug.
Since its first observation in 1995, Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) experiments in dilute gases have been performed with only a few different kinds of magnetic traps. We have performed a BEC experiment with /sup 87/Rb atoms in a Ioffe-Pritchard magnetic potential, which opens up the possibility to study, e.g., Bose-Einstein condensates released in only one dimension. Our trap consists of a clip-like coil, which generates a pure two-dimensional (2D) quadrupole field for radial confinement. The axial confinement is provided by two plane pinch coils inside the clip-coil. These two coils create a bottle field. Two additional Helmholtz coils on the same symmetry axis are used to compensate the homogeneous part of the bottle field. By continuously varying the currents through the coils, the trapping potential can be changed from a 3D spherical harmonic to a 2D linear potential. The change can be done adiabatically or nonadiabatically by switching off the axial confinement slowly, or instantaneously respectively. This opens up the possibility to study 1D nonlinear atom optics. In combination with, e.g., far detuned light sheets, a Fabry-Perot type interferometer for a condensate might be realizable. Our experiments are performed in a vacuum system with two magneto-optical traps, which serves as the source of cold atoms for the magnetic trap. 10/sup 9/ atoms are captured in less than one minute. RF-induced evaporative cooling is used to increase the phase space density of the trapped atomic cloud. The BEC phase transition occurs at a temperature of 550 nK with 10/sup 6/ particles in the trap. Pure condensates with more than 10/sup 5/ atoms were produced.
Summary form only given.Since its first observation in 1995, Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) experiments in dilute gases have been performed with only a few different kinds of magnetic traps. We have performed a BEC experiment with /sup 87/Rb atoms in a Ioffe-Pritchard magnetic potential, which opens up the possibility to study, e.g., Bose-Einstein condensates released in only one dimension. Our trap consists of a clip-like coil, which generates a pure two-dimensional (2D) quadrupole field for radial confinement. The axial confinement is provided by two plane pinch coils inside the clip-coil. These two coils create a bottle field. Two additional Helmholtz coils on the same symmetry axis are used to compensate the homogeneous part of the bottle field. By continuously varying the currents through the coils, the trapping potential can be changed from a 3D spherical harmonic to a 2D linear potential. The change can be done adiabatically or nonadiabatically by switching off the axial confinement slowly, or instantaneously respectively. This opens up the possibility to study 1D nonlinear atom optics. In combination with, e.g., far detuned light sheets, a Fabry-Perot type interferometer for a condensate might be realizable. Our experiments are performed in a vacuum system with two magneto-optical traps, which serves as the source of cold atoms for the magnetic trap. 10/sup 9/ atoms are captured in less than one minute. RF-induced evaporative cooling is used to increase the phase space density of the trapped atomic cloud. The BEC phase transition occurs at a temperature of 550 nK with 10/sup 6/ particles in the trap. Pure condensates with more than 10/sup 5/ atoms were produced.
Topological phase imprinting is a unique technique for vortex formation in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of an alkali-metal gas, in that it does not involve rotation: the BEC is trapped in a quadrupole field with a uniform bias field which is reversed adiabatically leading to vortex formation at the center of the magnetic trap. The scenario has been experimentally verified by Leanhardt et al. employing
23Na atoms. Recently similar experiments have been conducted by Hirotani et al. in which a BEC of
87Rb atoms was used. In the latter experiments the authors found that fine-tuning of the field reverse time
Trev is required to achieve stable vortex formation. Otherwise, they often observed vortex fragmentation or a condensate without a vortex. It is shown in this paper that this behavior can be attributed to the heavy mass of the
Rb atom. The confining potential, which depends on the eigenvalue
mB of the hyperfine spin $\mathbit{F}$ along the magnetic field, is now shifted by the gravitational field perpendicular to the vortex line. Then the positions of two weak-field-seeking states with
mB=1 and 2 deviate from each other. This effect is more prominent for BECs with a heavy atomic mass, for which the deviation is greater and, moreover, the Thomas-Fermi radius is smaller. We found, by solving the Gross-Pitaevskii equation numerically, that two condensates interact in a very complicated way leading to fragmentation of vortices, unless
Trev is properly tuned.
We study the formation of vortices in a dipolar Bose–Einstein condensate in a synthetic magnetic field by numerically solving the Gross–Pitaevskii equation. The formation process depends on the dipole strength, the rotating frequency, the potential geometry, and the orientation of the dipoles. We make an extensive comparison with vortices created by a rotating trap, especially focusing on the issues of the critical rotating frequency and the vortex number as a function of the rotating frequency. We observe that a higher rotating frequency is needed to generate a large number of vortices and the anisotropic interaction manifests itself as a perceptible difference in the vortex formation. Furthermore, a large dipole strength or aspect ratio also can increase the number of vortices effectively. In particular, we discuss the validity of the Feynman rule.