BKT physics in trapped 2D Bose and Fermi gases

Chih-Chun Chien, Jian-Huang She, Fred Cooper

Gora V. Shlyapnikov

Pierre Clad 'e

Jiho Noh, Jeongwon Lee, Jongchul Mun

The physics in two-dimensional (2D) systems is very different from what we observe in three-dimensional (3D) systems. Thermal fluctuations in 2D systems are enhanced, and they prevent the conventional Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) at non-zero temperatures by destroying the long-range order. However, a phase transition to a superfluid phase is still expected to occur in a 2D system along with an emergence of a quasi-long-range order, explained by the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) mechanism. Within the BKT mechanism, a universal jump of the superfluid density in a 2D Bosonic system was theoretically predicted by Nelson and Kosterlitz, and was first observed in 2D \textsuperscript{4}He films by Bishop and Reppy. Recent experiments in trapped ultracold 2D Bose gas systems have shown signatures of the BKT transition, and its superfluidity. However, the universal jump in the superfluid density was not observed in these systems. Here we report the first observation of the universal jump in the superfluid density using an optically trapped ultracold 2D Bose gas. The measured superfluid phase space density at the BKT transition agrees well with the predicted value within our measurement uncertainty. Additionally, we measure the phase fluctuations in our density profiles to show that the BKT transition occurs first, followed by the BEC transition.

Israel Chávez, M. Grether, MANUEL DE LLANO

Adilet Imambekov, I. E. Mazets, Dmitry S. Petrov +6 more

We investigate theoretically the evolution of the two-point density correlation function of a low-dimensional ultracold Bose gas after release from a tight transverse confinement. In the course of expansion thermal and quantum fluctuations present in the trapped systems transform into density fluctuations. For the case of free ballistic expansion relevant to current experiments, we present simple analytical relations between the spectrum of ``density ripples'' and the correlation functions of the original confined systems. We analyze several physical regimes, including weakly and strongly interacting one-dimensional (1D) Bose gases and two-dimensional (2D) Bose gases below the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transition. For weakly interacting 1D Bose gases, we obtain an explicit analytical expression for the spectrum of density ripples which can be used for thermometry. For 2D Bose gases below the BKT transition, we show that for sufficiently long expansion times the spectrum of the density ripples has a self-similar shape controlled only by the exponent of the first-order correlation function. This exponent can be extracted by analyzing the evolution of the spectrum of density ripples as a function of the expansion time.