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Physical Review Letters

Winding Up of the Wave-Function Phase by an Insulator-to-Superfluid Transition in a Ring of Coupled Bose-Einstein Condensates

Jacek Dziarmaga, Jakub Meisner, Wojciech Hubert Zurek

Published Sep 12, 2008• 125 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We study phase transition from the Mott insulator to superfluid in a periodic optical lattice. Kibble-Zurek mechanism predicts buildup of winding number through random walk of BEC phases, with the step size scaling as a third root of transition rate. We confirm this and demonstrate that this scaling accounts for the net winding number after the transition.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.101.115701

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We study phase transition from the Mott insulator to superfluid in a periodic optical lattice. Kibble-Zurek mechanism predicts buildup of winding number through random walk of BEC phases, with the step size scaling as a third root of transition rate. We confirm this and demonstrate that this scaling accounts for the net winding number after the transition.
Mott insulator-superfluid transition in a periodic lattice of Josephson junctions can be driven by tunneling rate increase. The resulting winding numbers WWW of the condensate wave function decrease with increasing quench time in accord with the Kibble-Zurek mechanism (KZM). However, in very slow quenches, Bose-Hubbard dynamics rearranges the wave-function phase so that its random walk cools, W2‾\overline{{W}^{2}}W2 decreases and eventually the wave function becomes too cold to overcome potential barriers separating different WWW. Thus, in contrast with KZM, in very slow quenches W2‾\overline{{W}^{2}}W2 is set by random walk with ``critical'' step size, independently of ${\ensuremath{\tau}}_{Q}$. As our study requires use of the truncated Wigner approximation (TWA) over relatively long time intervals, we investigate the validity of TWA by comparing its predictions with exact calculations for suitably small quantum systems.
We study the dynamics of phase transitions in the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model. To drive the system from a Mott insulator to a superfluid phase, we change the tunneling frequency at a finite rate. We investigate the buildup of correlations during fast and slow transitions using variational wave functions, dynamical Bogoliubov theory, Kibble-Zurek mechanism, and numerical simulations. We show that time-dependent correlations satisfy characteristic scaling relations that can be measured in optical lattices filled with cold atoms.
Phase transitions are usually treated as equilibrium phenomena, which yields telltale universality classes with scaling behavior of relaxation time and healing length. However, in second-order phase transitions relaxation time diverges near the critical point ("critical slowing down"). Therefore, every such transition traversed at a finite rate is a non-equilibrium process. Kibble-Zurek mechanism (KZM) captures this basic physics, predicting sizes of domains - fragments of broken symmetry - and the density of topological defects, long-lived relics of symmetry breaking that can survive long after the transition. To test KZM we simulate Bose-Einstein condensation in a ring using stochastic Gross-Pitaevskii equation and show that BEC formation can spontaneously generate quantized circulation of the newborn condensate. The magnitude of the resulting winding numbers and the time-lag of BEC density growth - both experimentally measurable - follow scalings predicted by KZM. Our results may also facilitate measuring the dynamical critical exponent for the BEC transition.
Bose-Einstein condensates of cold atoms in optical lattices are interesting because the dynamics of the transition from a Mott insulator to a superfluid driven by a quench into the superfluid phase exemplifies non-equilibrium evolutions of gauge-symmetry broken quantum phases. Here we have actually visualised features in real space, which have domain structures that depend on the stage of the transition dynamics. Namely, the system after the quench relaxes in three processes: (i) an exponential growth of the superfluid density, (ii) collapse of the domain structure, and (iii) vortex-antivortex pair-annihilation as the long-range superfluid order is formed. Topological picture due to Kibble-Zurek mechanism and Zurek's freeze-out scenario for slow quenches are confirmed.
Bose-Einstein condensates of cold atoms in optical lattices are interesting because the dynamics of the transition from a Mott insulator to a superfluid driven by a quench into the superfluid phase exemplifies non-equilibrium evolutions of gauge-symmetry broken quantum phases. Here we have actually visualised features in real space, which have domain structures that depend on the stage of the transition dynamics. Namely, the system after the quench relaxes in three processes: (i) an exponential growth of the superfluid density, (ii) collapse of the domain structure, and (iii) vortex-antivortex pair-annihilation as the long-range superfluid order is formed. Topological picture due to Kibble-Zurek mechanism and Zurek's freeze-out scenario for slow quenches are confirmed.