Numerical Simulations of Cooling and Topological Excitations of Quantum Gases

Waseem Bakr, Philipp M. Preiss, M. Eric Tai +3 more

Thomas Bland

Gerardo Aldazabal, Néstor Parga

Yigal Ilin, Shai Tsesses, Guy Bartal +1 more

Abstract Raman transitions are used in quantum simulations with ultracold atoms for cooling, spectroscopy and creation of artificial gauge fields. Spatial shaping of the Raman fields allows local control of the effective Rabi frequency, which can be mapped to the atomic spin. Evanescent Raman fields are of special interest as they can provide a new degree of control emanating from their rapidly decaying profile and for their ability to generate features below the diffraction limit. This opens the door to the formation of sub-wavelength spin textures. In this work, we present a theoretical and numerical study of Raman Rabi frequency in the presence of evanescent driving fields. We show how spin textures can be created by spatially varying driving fields and demonstrate a skyrmionium lattice—a periodic array of topological spin excitations, each of which is composed of two skyrmions with opposite topological charges. Our results pave the way to quantum simulation of spin excitation dynamics in magnetic materials, especially of itinerant spin models.

J. Beugnon

Erik Rydow

Thermal fluctuations, the microscopic fluctuations of things due to their temperature, counteract order in many-body systems. Thermal fluctuations often lead to high-temperature disordered phases and low-temperature ordered ones. In lower dimensions, thermal fluctuations are relatively stronger with two-dimensional materials being just on the brink of thermal fluctuations destroying their order. Twodimensional materials therefore display unique behaviour, for example undergoing a superfluid phase transition driven by point-like topological defects. In this work, we realise two-dimensional bosonic quantum gases of the isotope Rb-87 in precisely controlled potentials to study how quantum-tunnelling and spatially disordered potentials affect the phases of matter they form. We also present a new scheme for cooling quantum gases directly in the finely tuned radiofrequency-dressed traps confining the gases in our experiments. To study tunnel-coupled gases, this work utilises a novel method to read out information from bilayer quantum gas experiments by analysing noise patterns arising from interference effects. We find that quantum-tunnelling between the two layers in a bilayer system can cause both layers to remain superfluid at higher temperatures than without quantum tunnelling. We compare our results to predictions using renormalisation-group theory and numerical simulations. We experimentally observe the predicted double-layer superfluid phase, a novel phase where the U(1) symmetry of the relative phase is broken and relative excitations are suppressed. Separately, we investigate the topological Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless phase transition in disordered two-dimensional Bose gases. We find that such systems can be driven across this phase transition by increasing the strength of an applied disordered potential. We experimentally map out the phase diagram for a continuous 2D Bose gas in the presence of disorder, which has not previously been carried out to the best of our knowledge. We find that the presence of disorder increases the number of topological defects at a given temperature while reducing the rate at which the number of defects increases with temperature. The experimental results for 2D disordered Bose gases are in qualitative agreement with numerical simulations for the parameter regime studied.