In recent decades, ultra-cold atomic gases (temperature scale of nano-Kelvin) have become versatile platforms to study many fascinating phenomena in various fields of physics, owing to their unprecedented purity and controllability of interactions and geometries. In this thesis, we aim to investigate a synthetic Raman-type spin-orbit coupling in a three-dimensional Bose gas. The spin-orbit coupling arising from the interaction of a particle’s spin with its motion plays a crucial role in physics. Our studies of the static and dynamic properties including the ground-state phases, collective oscillations, sound velocity and superfluidity, may help us better understand this exotic effect in nature.
In recent decades, ultra-cold atomic gases (temperature scale of nano-Kelvin) have become versatile platforms to study many fascinating phenomena in various fields of physics, owing to their unprecedented purity and controllability of interactions and geometries. In this thesis, we aim to investigate a synthetic Raman-type spin-orbit coupling in a three-dimensional Bose gas. The spin-orbit coupling arising from the interaction of a particle’s spin with its motion plays a crucial role in physics. Our studies of the static and dynamic properties including the ground-state phases, collective oscillations, sound velocity and superfluidity, may help us better understand this exotic effect in nature.
Ultra-cold quantum gases subjected to light-induced synthetic gauge potentials have become an emergent field of theoretical and experimental studies. Because of the novel application of two-photon Raman transitions, ultra-cold neutral atoms behave like charged particles in magnetic field. The Raman coupling naturally gives rise to an effective spin-orbit interaction which couples the atom’s center-of-mass motion to its selected pseudo-spin degrees of freedom. Combined with unprecedented controllability of interactions, geometry, disorder strength, spectroscopy, and high resolution measurement of momentum distribution, etc., we are truly in an exciting era of ful- filling and going beyond Richard Feynman’s vision of realizing quantum simulators to better understand the quantum mechanical nature of the universe, manifested immensely in the ultra-cold regimes. In this dissertation, we present a collection of theoretical progresses made by the doctoral candidate and his colleagues and collaborators. From the past few years of work, we mainly address three aspects of the synthetic spin-orbit and light field induced coupling in ultracold quantum gases: a) The ground-state physics of single- particle system, two-body bound states, and many-body systems, all of which are subjected to spin-orbit coupling originated from synthetic gauge potentials; b) The symmetry breaking, topological phase transition and quench dynamics, which are conveniently offered by the realized experimental setup; c) The proposal and impli- cations of light field induced dynamical spin-orbit coupling for atoms inside optical cavity. Our work represents an important advancement of theoretical understanding to the active research frontier of ultra-cold atom physics with spin-orbit coupling.
Since the realization of Bose-Einstein condensation in 1995, experimentalists in ultracold atomic gas community have developed a set of entirely new methods to study quantum gases. In ultracold atomic gases, implementation of synthetic gauge fields, the spin-orbit coupling, optical lattices and Feshbach resonances, provides a clean and highly controllable platform to tune the parameters of the system, which are typically fixed for real materials. Motivated by the rapid developments of experimental progresses, I investigate the ultracold atomic gases with synthetic gauge fields. \n \nIn this thesis, a bosonic gas in optical lattices in the presence of an effective staggered magnetic flux will be studied, using a generalized Bose-Hubbard model. Phase transition from the Mott insulating phase to the superfluid phase will be discussed. Novel superfluid phases including the stripe phase and the plane wave phase will be discussed. Furthermore, the existence of a tricritical point in the phase diagram is predicted. \n \nTo study Fermi systems with synthetic gauge fields, a spin-1=2 Fermi gas with Rashba spin-orbit coupling is investigated by studying the structure of vortex line through the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer to Bose-Einstein condensation (BCSBEC) crossover. Due to the spin-orbit coupling, the s-wave interacting Fermi gas behaves like an effective p-wave paired system. A discussion about the vortex line structure will be provided by calculating the spatial distribution of the gap function, the density, the particle current, and also the elementary excitations. It has been found that the most robust superfluid occurs around the unitary point, indicated by the smallest healing length and the largest critical current. \n \nFinally, motivated by the recent progress of p-wave resonantly Fermi gas in experiment, an extension of Nozières-Schmitt-Rink method to the p-wave case will be given. An investigation of the normal state properties will be given by calculating the equation of state and the p-wave contacts, which have been measured by the experiment. Furthermore, the superfluid transition temperature with realistic parameters appropriate for experiment is calculated and is found to be within experimental reach.
Artificial synthetic gauge field and spin-orbit coupling has been extensively studied following their experimental realization in ultracold atomic systems. Thanks for the versatile controllability, such systems not only provide possibilities to simulate and study important models in multidisciplinary fields of physics, but also work as an excellent platform to engineer novel states of matter and quantum phenomena. This paper reviews some recent progresses on the study of ultracold atomic systems with spin-orbit coupling, focusing on the effects induced by dissipation, novel interaction forms, large symmetry of spins, and long-range interactions. The investigation in these aspects is closely related to the characteristics of ultracold atomic systems, hence can bring new inspirations and perspectives on the understanding of spin-orbit coupling. In this review, we firstly investigate the appearance of a topological superradiant state in a quasi-one-dimensional Fermi gas with cavity-assisted Raman process. A cavity-assisted spin-orbit coupling and a bulk gap opening at half filling will be induced by the superradiant light generated in the transversely driven cavity mode. The topological superradiant state and the corresponding topological phase transition in the system can be driven by this mechanism. Then, symmetry-protected topological states of interacting fermions will be introduced in a quasi-one-dimensional cold gas of alkaline-earth-like atoms. Raman-assisted spin-orbit couplings in the clock states, together with the spin-exchange interactions in the clock-state manifolds will give rise to symmetry-protected topological states for interacting fermions, by taking advantage of the separation of orbital and nuclear-spin degrees of freedom in these alkaline-earth-like atoms. Furthermore, we show that an exotic topological defect, double-quantum spin vortices, which are characterized by doubly quantized circulating spin currents and unmagnetized filled cores, can exist in the ground states of SU(3) spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensates. It is found that the combined effects of SU(3) spin-orbit coupling and spin-exchange interaction determine the ground-state phase diagram. Finally, we demonstrate that spin-orbit coupling and soft-core long-range interaction can induce an exotic supersolid phase of Bose gas, with the emergence of spontaneous circulating particle current. This implies that a finite angular momentum can be generated with neither external rotation nor synthetic magnetic field, and the direction of the angular momentum can be altered by adjusting the strength of spin-orbit coupling or interatomic interaction.
This review focuses on recent developments in synthetic spin-orbit (SO) coupling in ultracold atomic gases. Two types of SO coupling are discussed. One is Raman process induced coupling between spin and motion along one of the spatial directions and the other is Rashba SO coupling. We emphasize their common features in both single-particle and two-body physics and the consequences of both in many-body physics. For instance, single particle ground state degeneracy leads to novel features of superfluidity and a richer phase diagram; increased low-energy density-of-state enhances interaction effects; the absence of Galilean invariance and spin-momentum locking gives rise to intriguing behaviours of superfluid critical velocity and novel quantum dynamics; and the mixing of two-body singlet and triplet states yields a novel fermion pairing structure and topological superfluids. With these examples, we show that investigating SO coupling in cold atom systems can, enrich our understanding of basic phenomena such as superfluidity, provide a good platform for simulating condensed matter states such as topological superfluids and more importantly, result in novel quantum systems such as SO coupled unitary Fermi gas and high spin quantum gases. Finally we also point out major challenges and some possible future directions.
Spin-orbit (SO) coupling leads to many fundamental phenomena in a wide range of quantum systems from nuclear physics, condensed matter physics to atomic physics. For instance, in electronic condensed matter systems, SO coupling can lead to quantum spin Hall states or topological insulators, which have potential applications in quantum devices. Recently, SO coupling has been artificially induced in quantum liquids - ultracold dilute atomic Bose and Fermi gases - by the so-called synthetic gauge fields. Combined with unprecedented controllability of interactions and geometry in ultracold atoms, this manipulation of SO coupling opens an entirely new paradigm for studying strong correlations of quantum many-body systems under Abelian and non-Abelian gauge fields. In the major portion of this thesis, we theoretically investigate the ground state and collective excitations of a two-component Bose gas in a two-dimensional harmonic trap, subject to Rashba SO coupling. Our work represents an important extension into the regime of non-Abelian gauge field in which the spin degrees of freedom play an essential role. -- Abstract and Thesis are based on our publications in: (1) 10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.010402 (2) 10.1103/PhysRevA.85.023606 (3) 10.1103/PhysRevA.87.033627 (4) 10.1103/PhysRevA.83.033607 (5) 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.123201
The dissertation explores the effects of synthetic spin-orbit coupling on the behaviour of quantum gases in several different contexts. We first study realistic methods to create vortices in spin-orbit-coupled (SOC) Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC). We propose two different methods to induce thermodynamically stable static vortex configurations: (1) to rotate both the Raman lasers and the anisotropic trap; and (2) to impose a synthetic Abelian field on top of synthetic spin-orbit interactions. We solve the Gross-Pitaevskii equation for several experimentally relevant regimes and find new interesting effects such as spatial separation of left- and right-moving spin-orbit-coupled condensates, and the appearance of unusual vortex arrangements. Next we consider cold atoms in an optical lattice with synthetic SOC in the Mott-insulator regime. We calculate the parameters of the corresponding tight-binding model and derive the low-energy spin Hamiltonian which is a combination of Heisenberg model, quantum compass model and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. We find that the Hamiltonian supports a rich classical phase diagram with collinear, spiral and vortex phases. Next we study the time evolution of the magnetization in a Rashba spin-orbit-coupled Fermi gas, starting from a fully-polarized initial state. We model the dynamics using a Boltzmann equation, which we solve in the Hartree-Fock approximation. The resulting non-linear system of equations gives rise to three distinct dynamical regimes controlled by the ratio of interaction and spin-orbit-coupling strength λ: for small λ, the magnetization decays to zero. For intermediate λ, it displays undamped oscillations about zero and for large λ, a partially magnetized state is dynamically stabilized. Motivated by an interesting stripe phase which appears in BEC with SOC [Li et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 225301 (2011)], we study the finite-temperature phase diagram of a pseudospin-1/2 Bose gas with contact interactions. We show that strong inter-spin interactions can lead to the appearance of magnetically ordered phases at temperatures above the superfluid transition. For the case of inter-spin attraction, we also discuss the possibility of a bosonic analogue of the Cooper-paired phase, however this state is not energetically favourable. We extend our calculations to a spin-orbit-coupled Bose gas to investigate the possibility of stripe ordering in the normal phase. However, within our approximations, we do not find an instability towards stripe formation. Finally, we consider a two-dimensional Bose gas at zero temperature with an underlying quartic single-particle dispersion in one spatial direction. This Hamiltonian can be realized using the NIST scheme of spin-orbit coupling [Y.-J. Lin, K. Jimenez-Garcia, and I. B. Spielman, Nature 471, 83 (2011)], or using the shaken lattice scheme of Parker et al. [C. V. Parker, L.-C. Ha and C. Chin, Nature Physics 9, 769 (2013)]. By numerically comparing energies of various trial wave-functions, we show that, at low densities, the ground state is strongly correlated, in contrast to a typical mean-field BEC. The trial wave-function with the lowest energy is of Jastrow-type and it describes a state with finite, but strongly reduced, condensate fraction.