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Low Temperature Physics

Magnetic domains in spinor Bose-Einstein condensates

Michał Matuszewski, Tristram J. Alexander, Yuri S. Kivshar

Published Aug 1, 2010• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We discuss the structure of spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates in the presence of a homogenous magnetic field. We demonstrate that phase separation can occur in the ground state of antiferromagnetic (polar) condensates, while the spin components of ferromagnetic condensates are always miscible, so that no phase separation occurs in them. Our analysis predicts that this phenomenon takes place when the energy of the lowest homogenous state is a concave function of the magnetization. We propose a method for creating spin domains by adiabatic switching-on of a magnetic field. We also discuss the phenomena of dynamical instability and spin domain formation.

DOI
10.1063/1.3499231

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We discuss the structure of spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates in the presence of a homogenous magnetic field. We demonstrate that phase separation can occur in the ground state of antiferromagnetic (polar) condensates, while the spin components of ferromagnetic condensates are always miscible, so that no phase separation occurs in them. Our analysis predicts that this phenomenon takes place when the energy of the lowest homogenous state is a concave function of the magnetization. We propose a method for creating spin domains by adiabatic switching-on of a magnetic field. We also discuss the phenomena of dynamical instability and spin domain formation.
We analyze the structure of spin-one Bose-Einstein condensates in the presence of a homogeneous magnetic field. We classify the homogeneous stationary states and study their existence, bifurcations, and energy spectra. We reveal that phase separation can occur in the ground state of antiferromagnetic (polar) condensates while the spin components of the ferromagnetic condensates are always miscible and no phase separation occurs. Our theoretical model, confirmed by numerical simulations, explains that this phenomenon takes place when the energy of the lowest homogeneous state is a concave function of the magnetization. In particular, we predict that phase separation can be observed in a 23Na^{23}\text{N}\text{a}23Na condensate confined in a highly elongated harmonic trap. Finally, we discuss the phenomena of dynamical instability and spin domain formation.
We consider a spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate trapped in a harmonic potential under the influence of a homogeneous magnetic field. We investigate spatial and spin structure of the mean-field ground states under constraints on the number of atoms and the total magnetization. We show that the trapping potential can make the antiferromagnetic condensate separate into three distinct phases and ferromagnetic condensate into two distinct phases. In the ferromagnetic case, the magnetization is located in the center of the harmonic trap, while in the antiferromagnetic case magnetized phases appear in the outer regions. We describe how the transition from the Thomas-Fermi regime to the single-mode approximation regime with decreasing number of atoms results in the disappearance of the domains. We suggest that the ground states can be created in experiment by adiabatically changing the magnetic-field strength.
Spinor Bose-Einstein condensates under external magnetic fields exhibit well-characterized spin domains of its ground state due to spin-dependent interactions. At low temperatures, collision-induced spin-mixing instabilities may promote the condensate to dwell into metastable states occurring near the phase boundaries. In this paper, we study theoretically the metastable spin-phase diagram of a spin-1 antiferromagnetic Bose-Einstein condensate at zero and finite temperatures. The approach makes use of Hartree-Fock theory and exploits the symmetry of the Hamiltonian and of the order parameters yielding a closed system of transcendental equations for the free energy, fully avoiding the use of self-consistency methods. Our results are consistent with recent experiments and allow us to explain qualitatively the different types of observed quench dynamics. In addition, we found that similar phenomena should occur in antiferromagnetic spinor condensates with a sudden change in the temperature. It is shown also that the increase in temperature induces a traceable shift of the ferromagnetic-polar transition boundary, behavior previously not noted by self-consistent mean-field calculations.
We interpret the recently observed spatial domain formation in spin-1 atomic condensates as a result of dynamical instability. Within the mean field theory, a homogeneous condensate is dynamically unstable (stable) for ferromagnetic (antiferromagnetic) atomic interactions. We find that this dynamical instability naturally leads to spontaneous domain formation as observed in several recent experiments for condensates with rather small numbers of atoms. For trapped condensates, our numerical simulations compare quantitatively to the experimental results, thus largely confirming the physical insight from our analysis of the homogeneous case.
In this thesis we investigate the static, dynamic, and thermodynamic properties\nof atomic spin-1 Bose gases in external magnetic fields. At low magnetic fields\nthe properties of single-component, or scalar condensates, are essentially\nunaffected but can become significantly altered for spinor Bose condensates as\nshown by our studies.\n\nWe first study the Bose-Einstein condensation of trapped spin-1 Bose gases by\nemploying the Hartree-Fock approximation and the two-fluid model within a mean\nfield approximation. Our detailed investigation reveals that the\nferromagnetically interacting spin-1 condensates exhibit triple condensations\nwhile the antiferromagnetically interacting ones show double condensations.\n\nThe ground state structure of homogeneous and trapped spin-1 Bose condensates\nwith ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic interactions at zero temperature in\nmagnetic fields are then investigated systematically. We further illuminate the\nimportant effect of quadratic Zeeman shift which causes a preferred occupation\nof the $|m_F=0\nangle$ state through spin exchange collisions, $2|m_F=0\nangle\nleftrightarrow |m_F=1\nangle + |m_F=-1\nangle$.\n\nWe also present detailed studies of the off-equilibrium coherent dynamics of\nspin-1 Bose condensates in magnetic fields within the single spatial mode\napproximation. Dynamical instabilities of the off-equilibrium oscillations are\nshown to be responsible for the formation of multiple domains as recently\nobserved in several 87^{87}87Rb experiments.\n\nFinally, we discuss briefly excited condensate states, or soliton-like states,\nin cigar-shaped spin-1 Bose condensates with an effective quasi-1D description,\nusing the developed nonpolynomial Schr"odinger equation.
Antiferromagnetic condensates are generally believed not to display modulational instability and subsequent spin-domain formation. Here we demonstrate that in the presence of a homogeneous magnetic field antiferromagnetic spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates can undergo spatial modulational instability followed by the subsequent generation of spin domains. Employing numerical simulations for realistic conditions, we show how this effect can be observed in sodium condensates confined in an optical trap. Finally, we link this instability and spin-domain formation with stationary modes of the condensate.