Physical Review A
Virtual monopoles in a bosonic atom–diatomic-molecule system
Sheng-Chang Li, Libin Fu, Jie Liu
Abstract
We investigate the virtual monopoles in an ultracold bosonic atom--diatomic-molecule system with a three-level second-quantized model. In the quantum theory, we show that the monopole field of the ground state does not have a spherical symmetry. We calculate the monopole charge and find that it is an integer multiple of the elementary charge ${g}_{0}=\frac{1}{2}$. This multiple exactly reflects the degeneracy properties of the ground state and strongly depends on the total particle number and the atom-number imbalance between two atomic species. In the mean-field limit, we illustrate that the system can create continuous monopole charges in the case of heteronuclear molecules. The underlying mechanism associated with the degeneracy properties and the application related to the quantum phase transition of the monopoles are briefly discussed as well.