Physical Review Letters
Spontaneous Macroscopic Spin Polarization in Independent Spinor Bose-Einstein Condensates
Mark H. Wheeler, K. M. Mertes, Jessie D. Erwin, David S. Hall
Abstract
We present experimental evidence for the spontaneous formation of a macroscopic spin polarization in overlapping regions of two independent Bose-Einstein condensates produced in different hyperfine states of 87Rb. The condensates are independent in the sense that we do not explicitly introduce a relative phase between them. A single "spin-tip" pulse maps the transverse spin polarization into longitudinal spin polarization, and the atomic density distributions are measured with a Stern-Gerlach imaging method. The resulting matter-wave interference patterns are anticorrelated.