The authors consider a random magnetic model which is related to Bose condensation in the presence of a random potential. It is an XY model with a random z field. The classical model always has an ordered ground state. The nature of the ground state is unusual: the main contribution to the spontaneous magnetisation comes from a dilute set of weakly interacting pairs of spins. Within each pair the spins are strongly coupled, so for low-energy dynamics only the motion of the total spin of the pair is relevant. This allows the construction of an effective Hamiltonian only involving the pairs' total spins. When this is semi-classically quantised via a 1/S expansion, they find that the zero-point spin wave motion destroys the magnetised ground state if either the number of spin states is sufficiently small (for fixed strength of disorder), or for sufficiently large disorder (for fixed number of spin states). Finally they discuss the relation of the model to the problem of Bose condensation in a random potential, where the interaction strength is related to the number of spin states in the spin model.
The authors consider a random magnetic model which is related to Bose condensation in the presence of a random potential. It is an XY model with a random z field. The classical model always has an ordered ground state. The nature of the ground state is unusual: the main contribution to the spontaneous magnetisation comes from a dilute set of weakly interacting pairs of spins. Within each pair the spins are strongly coupled, so for low-energy dynamics only the motion of the total spin of the pair is relevant. This allows the construction of an effective Hamiltonian only involving the pairs' total spins. When this is semi-classically quantised via a 1/S expansion, they find that the zero-point spin wave motion destroys the magnetised ground state if either the number of spin states is sufficiently small (for fixed strength of disorder), or for sufficiently large disorder (for fixed number of spin states). Finally they discuss the relation of the model to the problem of Bose condensation in a random potential, where the interaction strength is related to the number of spin states in the spin model.
The properties of systems with Bose-Einstein condensate in external time-independent random potentials are investigated in the frame of a self-consistent stochastic mean-field approximation. General considerations are presented, which are valid for finite temperatures, arbitrary strengths of the interaction potential, and for arbitrarily strong disorder potentials. The special case of a spatially uncorrelated random field is then treated in more detail. It is shown that the system consists of three components, condensed particles, uncondensed particles, and a glassy density fraction, but that the pure Bose glass phase with only a glassy density does not appear. The theory predicts a first-order phase transition for increasing disorder parameter, where the condensate fraction and the superfluid fraction simultaneously jump to zero. The influence of disorder on the ground-state energy, the stability conditions, the compressibility, the structure factor, and the sound velocity are analyzed. The uniform ideal condensed gas is shown to be always stochastically unstable, in the sense that an infinitesimally weak disorder destroys the Bose-Einstein condensate, returning the system to the normal state; but the uniform Bose-condensed system with finite repulsive interactions becomes stochastically stable and exists in a finite interval of the disorder parameter.
Spin-orbit-coupled bosons can exhibit rich equilibrium phases at low temperature and in the presence of particle-particle interactions. In the case with a 1D synthetic spin-orbit interaction, it has been observed that the ground state of a Bose gas can be a normal phase, stripe phase, or magnetized phase in different parameter regimes. The magnetized states are doubly degenerate and consist of a many-particle two-state system. In this work, we investigate the nonequilibrium quantum dynamics by switching on a simple one-dimensional optical lattice potential as external perturbation to induce resonant couplings between the magnetized phases, and predict a quantum spin dynamics which cannot be obtained in the single-particle systems. In particular, due to particle-particle interactions, the transition of the Bose condensate from one magnetized phase to the other is forbidden when the external perturbation strength is less than a critical value, and a full transition can occur only when the perturbation exceeds such critical strength. This phenomenon manifests itself a dynamical phase transition, with the order parameter defined by the time-averaged magnetization over an oscillation period, and the critical point behavior being exactly solvable. The thermal fluctuations are also considered in detail. From numerical simulations and exact analytic studies we show that the predicted many-body effects can be well observed with the current experiments.
We investigate the phase transition exhibited by the Bose gas in systems which are not translation-invariant. Though it has been known since the sixties that Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) cannot occur in translation invariant systems for dimension 1 or 2, one can nevertheless enhance this phase transition in low-dimensional Bose gases by the addition of suitable external potentials (thus losing translation invariance in the process). However, the resulting condensate is then found to be in localised states, while BEC is usually understood to be the macroscopic occupation of extended kinetic eigenstates. It is therefore not clear whether the phase transition obtained by means of localisation is of the same nature as the one related to the usual concept of BEC. In this thesis, we consider two classes of localised systems. The first one is a family of random systems, where the Bose gas is contained in a disordered medium, which is modelled by a random external potential. Our second model consists of weak (scaled) external potentials. We first recall necessary conditions on these external potentials to enhance condensation in the localised states. We then show under very general assumptions that in these models, BEC in the usual sense occurs also, in a generalised sense. This means that the particles condense on kinetic eigenstates with arbitrary small energy. For the non-interacting Bose gas, we can moreover show that the densities of both condensates are actually equal. Next, we investigate BEC on a finer scale, asking whether one can obtain condensation in a single kinetic eigenstate. We show that in spite of the existence of a phase transition, and the occurence of generalised BEC, no condensation exists in any single kinetic eigenstate. In particular, the so-called "ground-state condensation" does not occur in these localised systems. Finally, we establish a possible generalisation of the Bogoliubov c-number approximation to take into account the very specific properties of BEC in the presence of localisation, and discuss how to interpret the result of the corresponding variational problem.
We analyze the zero-temperature phase diagram of the spin-1/2 quantum XXZ chain in the presence of weak disorder. The effects of various random perturbations are considered, including random fields and random exchange. For random perturbations that preserve the XY symmetry, we find a phase transition, as the anisotropy parameter is varied, from a ground state with quasi-long-range order (as in the pure system) to one in which typical correlation functions decay rapidly. The critical behavior at this transition is shown to be in the universality class of the Giamarchi-Schulz transition for one-dimensional bosons in a random potential. Random perturbations that break the XY symmetry are found always to destroy the quasi-long-range order of the ground state. Properties of the resulting random phases are also discussed.
NOTE: Text or symbols not renderable in plain ASCII are indicated by [...]. Abstract is included in .pdf document. We study the nature of various quantum phase transitions corresponding to the onset of superfluidity, at zero temperature, of bosons in a quenched medium. Particle-hole symmetry plays an essential role in determining the universality class of the transitions. To obtain a model with an exact particle-hole symmetry it is necessary to use the Josephson junction array Hamiltonian, which may include disorder in the Josephson couplings between phases at different sates. The functional integral formulation of this problem in d spatial dimensions yields a (d + 1)-dimensional classical XY-model with extended disorder, constant along the extra imaginary time dimension -- the so-called random rod problem. Particle-hole symmetry may then be broken by adding nonzero chemical potentials or site energies, which may also be site dependent and random. We may then distinguish three cases: (i) exact particle-hole symmetry, in which the site energies all vanish, (ii) statistical particle-hole symmetry in which the site energy distribution is symmetric about zero and hence vanishes on average, and (iii) complete absence of particle-hole symmetry in which the distribution is generic. We explore in each case the nature of the excitations in the nonsuperfluid Pose glass phase. We find, for example, that the compressibility, which has the interpretation of a temporal spin stiffness or superfluid density, is positive in cases (ii) and (iii), but that it vanishes with an essential singularity as full particle-hole symmetry is restored. We then focus on the critical point and discuss the validity of various scaling arguments. In particular, we argue that the dynamical exponent z could be different from d, and the arguments leading to their equality are incorrect. We then discuss the relevance of a type (ii) particle-hole symmetry breaking perturbation to the random rod critical behavior, identifying a nontrivial crossover exponent. This exponent cannot be calculated exactly but is argued to be positive and the symmetry breaking perturbation therefore relevant. We argue next that a perturbation of type (iii) is irrelevant to the resulting type (ii) critical behavior: the statistical symmetry is restored on large scales close to the critical point, and case (ii) therefore describes the dirty boson fixed point. Using various duality transformations we verify all of these ideas in one dimension. To study higher dimensions we attempt, with partial success, to generalize the Dorogovtsev-Cardy-Boyonovsky double epsilon expansion technique to this problem. We find that when the dimension of time [...] is sufficiently small the symmetry breaking perturbation of type (ii) is irrelevant, but that for sufficiently large [...] this is a relevant perturbation and a new stable commensurate fixed point appears. We speculate that this new fixed point becomes the dirty boson fixed point when [...] = 1. We also show that for [...], there exists a particle-hole asymmetric fixed point of type (iii), but we provide evidence that it merges with the commensurate fixed point for some finite [...]. This tends to confirm symmetry restoration at the physical [...] = 1.