This chapter reviews the theoretical understanding of Bose and Fermi superfluids under rotation (or in an effective magnetic field) while placing this in context of the current experimental status. It focuses on theoretical predictions of the novel phases that can appear. One goal is to establish the connections with the physics of the fractional quantum Hall effect of electrons in semiconductors. As the chapter is intended to be tutorial in nature, it concentrates on the qualitative features and simple model calculations to present the essential ideas in as physically transparent a way as possible. It begins with a brief review of the properties of Bose–Einstein condensates subjected to rotation.
This chapter reviews the theoretical understanding of Bose and Fermi superfluids under rotation (or in an effective magnetic field) while placing this in context of the current experimental status. It focuses on theoretical predictions of the novel phases that can appear. One goal is to establish the connections with the physics of the fractional quantum Hall effect of electrons in semiconductors. As the chapter is intended to be tutorial in nature, it concentrates on the qualitative features and simple model calculations to present the essential ideas in as physically transparent a way as possible. It begins with a brief review of the properties of Bose–Einstein condensates subjected to rotation.
The close theoretical analogy between the physics of rapidly rotating atomic Bose condensates and the quantum Hall effect (i.e. a two-dimensional electron gas in a strong magnetic field) was first pointed out ten years ago. As a consequence of this analogy, a large number of strongly correlated quantum-Hall-type states have been predicted to occur in rotating Bose systems, and suggestions have been made for how to manipulate and observe their fractional quasiparticle excitations. Due to a very rapid development in experimental techniques over the past years, experiments on BEC now appear to be close to reaching the quantum Hall regime. This paper reviews the theoretical and experimental work done to date in exploring quantum Hall physics in cold bosonic gases. Future perspectives are discussed briefly, in particular the idea of exploiting some of these strongly correlated states in the context of topological quantum computing.
In this Chapter, we give a brief review of the state of the art of theoretical and experimental studies of synthetic magnetic fields and quantum Hall effects in ultracold atomic gases. We focus on integer, spin, and fractional Hall effects, indicate connections to topological matter, and discuss prospects for the realization of full-fledged gauge field theories where the synthetic magnetic field has its own dynamics. The advantages of these systems over traditional electronic systems are highlighted. Finally, interdisciplinary comparisons with other synthetic matter platforms based on photonic and trapped-ion systems are drawn. We hope this chapter to illustrate the exciting progress that the field has experienced in recent years.
Cold atomic gases of interacting bosons subject to rapid rotation and confined in anharmonic traps can theoretically exhibit analogues of the fractional quantum Hall effect for electrons in strong magnetic fields. In this setting the Coriolis force due to the rotation mimics the Lorentz force on charged particles but artificial gauge fields can also be obtained by coupling the internal structure of the atoms to light fields. The chapter discusses mathematical aspects of transitions to different strongly correlated phases that appear when the parameters of a model Hamiltonian are varied.
This thesis discusses two important topics in ultracold atomic gases: strong interactions in quantum gases, and quantum Hall physics in neutral atoms.First we give a brief introduction on basic scattering models in atomic physics, and an approach to adjust the interactions between atoms.We also include a list of experimental probes in cold atom physics.After these introductions, in Chapter 3, we report a few interesting problems in strongly interacting quantum gases.We introduce the BCS-BEC crossover model and relevant many-body techniques at the beginning, and discuss the details of several specific systems.We find the Fermi gases across narrow Feshbach resonances are strongly interacting at low temperature even when the magnetic field is several widths away from the resonance.We also discuss an approach to describe the metastable repulsive branch of Bose and Fermi gases across the resonance, and find a stable region of repulsive Bose gas close to unitarity.Some studies in two dimensional Fermi gases with spin imbalance are also included, and they are closely related to a number of recent experiments.In Chapter 4, we discuss quantum Hall physics in the context of neutral atomic gases.After illustrating how the Berry phase experienced by neutral atoms is equivalent to the magnetic field in electrons, we introduce the newly developed synthetic gauge field scheme in which a gauge potential is coupled to the neutral atoms.We give a detail introduction to this Raman coupling scheme developed by NIST group, and derive the theoretical model of the system.Then we make some predictions on the evolution of quantum Hall states when an extra anisotropy is applied from the external trap.Finally, we propose some experiments to verify our predictions.4.9 Phase diagram of the cloud in rotating anisotropic traps: two phases of the BEC and QH are identified. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4.10 Distortion and transition in vortex lattices of a rapidly rotating BEC in an anisotropic trap. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4.11 Density profiles at cut x = 0 and y = 0 of the Laughlin wavefunctions at different positions in figure 4.9. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4.12 Distribution of zeros in the relative coordinate of the ground state of two body problem in rotating anisotropic traps. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4.13 Variation in the distance of splitting zeros as a function of inverse interaction strength, for fixed anisotropy α = 0.96. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4.14 Density profiles after TOF expansion of the gas in a rotating isotropic trap.4.15 Density profiles after TOF expansion of anisotropy α = 0.94. . . . . . . . .4.16 Second order correlation in equation 4.64, in a rotating isotropic (left) and anisotropic (right) trap. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4.17 A sketch of high-resolution in situ imaging technique in neutral atoms. . . .4.18 In situ images of the quantity |ψ(r/2, -r/2)| for an anisotropy α = 0.96. .x
In this article, we review developments in the theory of rapidly rotating degenerate atomic gases. The main focus is on the equilibrium properties of a single-component atomic Bose gas, which (at least at rest) forms a Bose–Einstein condensate. Rotation leads to the formation of quantized vortices which order into a vortex array, in close analogy with the behaviour of superfluid helium. Under conditions of rapid rotation, when the vortex density becomes large, atomic Bose gases offer the possibility to explore the physics of quantized vortices in novel parameter regimes. First, there is an interesting regime in which the vortices become sufficiently dense that their cores, as set by the healing length, start to overlap. In this regime, the theoretical description simplifies, allowing a reduction to single-particle states in the lowest Landau level. Second, one can envisage entering a regime of very high vortex density, when the number of vortices becomes comparable to the number of particles in the gas. In this regime, theory predicts the appearance of a series of strongly correlated phases, which can be viewed as bosonic versions of fractional quantum Hall states. In this article, we describe the equilibrium properties of rapidly rotating atomic Bose gases in both the mean-field and the strongly correlated regimes, and related theoretical developments for Bose gases in lattices, for multi-component Bose gases and for atomic Fermi gases. The current experimental situation and outlook for the future are discussed in light of these theoretical developments.
Rapid progress in the field of ultracold atoms allows the study of many new and old models of quantum many-body physics. In this doctoral dissertation we theoretically explore exotic phases of ultracold quantum gases, with a special focus spin-imbalanced attractive Fermi gases in lower dimensional situations. Chapter 2 reviews the mean-field theory approach to pairing in twocomponent Fermi gases. Applications of this theory are illustrated in Chapter 3, where we discuss mostly well-known results of mean-field theory applied to imbalanced Fermi gases. Adapted from the author's prior publications, Chapters 4, 5 use the theory developed in Chapters 2, 3. In Chapter 6 we discuss the physics of Fermi gases, squeezed into one spatial dimension. In this and Chapter 7, we go beyond mean-field theory, approaching the problem through the Bethe ansatz, exact solutions to few-body problems and Fermi-Bose mappings ("fermionization"). We also show results from a joint effort with the experimental group of Randy Hulet at Rice University to experimentally realize and probe a strongly interacting one dimensional paired Fermi gas. In Chapter 8, after a brief introduction to rapidly rotating two dimensional Bose gases, we introduce a new protocol to create few atom fractional quantum Hall states. Finally, in Chapter 9 we study the effects of two-body losses on lattice Bose gases with hardcore interactions in one and two spatial dimensions.