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Physical Review A

Stability of bosonic atomic and molecular condensates near a Feshbach resonance

Sourish Basu, Erich J. Mueller

Published Nov 3, 2008• 25 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We explore the Bose condensed phases of an atomic gas on the molecular side of a Feshbach resonance. In the absence of atom-molecule and molecule-molecule scattering, we show that the atomic condensate is either a saddle point of the free energy with energy always exceeding that of the molecular condensate, or has a negative compressibility (hence unstable to density fluctuations). Therefore no phase transition occurs between the atomic and molecular condensates. We also show that a repulsive molecule-molecule scattering can stabilize a sufficiently dense atomic condensate, leading to the possibility of a phase transition. We caution that three-body processes may render this transition unobservable.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.78.053603

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We explore the Bose condensed phases of an atomic gas on the molecular side of a Feshbach resonance. In the absence of atom-molecule and molecule-molecule scattering, we show that the atomic condensate is either a saddle point of the free energy with energy always exceeding that of the molecular condensate, or has a negative compressibility (hence unstable to density fluctuations). Therefore no phase transition occurs between the atomic and molecular condensates. We also show that a repulsive molecule-molecule scattering can stabilize a sufficiently dense atomic condensate, leading to the possibility of a phase transition. We caution that three-body processes may render this transition unobservable.
We explore the Bose condensed phases of an atomic gas on the molecular side of a Feshbach resonance. In the absence of atom-molecule and molecule-molecule scattering, we show that the atomic condensate is either a saddle point of the free energy with energy always exceeding that of the molecular condensate, or has a negative compressibility (hence unstable to density fluctuations). Therefore no phase transition occurs between the atomic and molecular condensates. We also show that a repulsive molecule-molecule scattering can stabilize a sufficiently dense atomic condensate, leading to the possibility of a phase transition. We caution that 3-body processes may render this transition unobservable.
In this paper, we study the phase diagram of a homogeneous Bose gas with a repulsive interaction near a wide Feshbach resonance at zero temperature. The Bose-Einstein-condensation (BEC) state of atoms is a metastable state. When the scattering length aaa exceeds a critical value depending on the atom density nnn, na3>0.035n{a}^{3}>0.035na3>0.035, the molecular excitation energy is imaginary and the atomic BEC state is dynamically unstable against molecule formation. The BEC state of diatomic molecules has lower energy, where the atomic excitation is gapped and the molecular excitation is gapless. However, when the scattering length is above another critical value, na3>0.0164n{a}^{3}>0.0164na3>0.0164, the molecular BEC state becomes an unstable coherent mixture of atoms and molecules. In both BEC states, the binding energy of diatomic molecules is reduced due to the many-body effect.
Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of Feshbach molecules in a homogeneous Bose gas is studied at finite temperatures in a single-channel mean-field approach where the Hartree-Fock energy and pairing gap are determined self-consistently. In the molecular-BEC state, the atomic excitation is gapped and the molecular excitation is gapless. The binding energy of Feshbach molecules is shifted from the vacuum value by many-body effects. When the scattering length as{a}_{s}as​ of the atoms is negative, the system is subject to mechanical collapse due to negative compressibility. The system is stable in most regions with positive scattering lengths. However, at low temperatures near the resonance, the molecular-BEC state vanishes, and the coherent mixture of atomic and molecular BEC is subject to mechanical collapse.
Recent repoet on the formation of two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) of spinning g-wave molecules is surprise. Here we study quantum phase transition in the quasi-2D atomic Bose gas with a g-wave Feshbach resonance, and show that there are two phase transitions in this system: from a phase with only a atomic Bose-Einstein condensate to a phase with coexistence of atomic and molecular condensation and from the coexistence phase to a phase with only a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate. We show that the g-wave resonance Feshbach has two features in the phase transitions, a phase with only a atomic Bose-Einstein condensate is no longer forbidden and resonance effects appear only at levels beyond the mean-field. We determine the T=0 beyond mean-field phase diagram of the gas as a function of magnetic field and molecular condensation density. We also detemine the ratio of atomic to molecular condensation in the coexistence phase, which can be tested in experiments.
We study the steady state of a zero-temperature Bose gas near a Feshbach or photoassociation resonance using a two-channel mean-field model that incorporates atomic and molecular condensates, as well as correlated atom pairs originating from dissociation of molecules into pairs of atoms. We start from a many-body Hamiltonian for atom-molecule conversion, and derive the time-dependent version of the mean-field theory. The stationary solution of the time-dependent model is rendered unique with an approximation that entails that all noncondensate atoms are correlated, as if emerging from dissociation of molecules. The steady state is solved numerically, but limiting cases are also found analytically. The system has a phase transition in which the atomic condensate emerges in a nonanalytic fashion. We quantify the scaling of the observable quantities, such as fractions of atomic and molecular condensates, with the detuning and the atom-molecule conversion strength. Qualitatively, the dependence on detuning rounds out with increasing coupling strength. A study of the thermodynamics shows that the pressure of the atom-molecule system is negative, even on the molecule side of the resonance. This indicates the possibility of mechanical instability.