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Acta Physica Sinica

Dynamic structure factors and sum rules in two-component quantum gases with spin-orbit coupling

He Li, Zeng-Qiang Yu

Published Jan 1, 2016• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Sum rules for the dynamic structure factors are powerful tools to explore the collective behaviors in many-body systems at zero temperature as well as at finite temperatures. The recent remarkable realization of synthetic spin-orbit (SO) coupling in quantum gases is opening up new perspective to study the intriguing SO effects with ultracold atoms. So far, a specific type of SO coupling, which is generated by a pair of Raman laser beams, has been experimentally achieved in Bose-Einstein condensates of 87Rb and degenerate Fermi gases of 40K and 6Li. In the presence of SO coupling, the dynamic structure factors for the density fluctuation and spin fluctuation satisfy different sum rules. In particular, in the two-component quantum gases with inter-species Raman coupling, the f-sum rule for the spin fluctuation has an additional term proportional to the transverse spin polarization. Due to the coupling between the momentum and spin, the first moment of the dynamic structure factor does not necessarily possess the inversion symmetry, which is in strong contrast to the conventional system without SO coupling. Such an asymmetric behavior could be observed in both Fermi gases and Bose gases with Raman coupling. As a demonstration, we focus on the uniform case at zero temperature in this work. For the non-interacting Fermi gases, the asymmetric first moment appears only when the Raman detuning is finite. The asymmetric amplitude is quite limited, and it vanishes at both zero detuning and infinite detuning. For the weakly interacting Bose gases, the first moment is asymmetric in momentum space even at zero detuning, when the ground state spontaneously breaks the Z2 symmetry in the plane-wave condensation phase. Using the Bogoliubov method, the dynamic structure factor and its first moment are explicitly calculated for various interaction parameters. We find that the asymmetric behavior in the spin channel could be much more significant than in the density channel, and the asymmetric amplitude is enhanced as the interaction strength increases. Experimentally, the dynamic structure factors can be directly measured through the two photon Bragg scattering. Numeric simulations show that to observe the deviation of inversion symmetry in the first moment, the resolution of the Bragg spectroscopy should reach a required value. For the typical parameters of the rubidium atomic gas, the required resolution is about 10-2Er with Er being the recoil energy. Our predictions can be tested in the future experiment.

DOI
10.7498/aps.65.131101

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Sum rules for the dynamic structure factors are powerful tools to explore the collective behaviors in many-body systems at zero temperature as well as at finite temperatures. The recent remarkable realization of synthetic spin-orbit (SO) coupling in quantum gases is opening up new perspective to study the intriguing SO effects with ultracold atoms. So far, a specific type of SO coupling, which is generated by a pair of Raman laser beams, has been experimentally achieved in Bose-Einstein condensates of 87Rb and degenerate Fermi gases of 40K and 6Li. In the presence of SO coupling, the dynamic structure factors for the density fluctuation and spin fluctuation satisfy different sum rules. In particular, in the two-component quantum gases with inter-species Raman coupling, the f-sum rule for the spin fluctuation has an additional term proportional to the transverse spin polarization. Due to the coupling between the momentum and spin, the first moment of the dynamic structure factor does not necessarily possess the inversion symmetry, which is in strong contrast to the conventional system without SO coupling. Such an asymmetric behavior could be observed in both Fermi gases and Bose gases with Raman coupling. As a demonstration, we focus on the uniform case at zero temperature in this work. For the non-interacting Fermi gases, the asymmetric first moment appears only when the Raman detuning is finite. The asymmetric amplitude is quite limited, and it vanishes at both zero detuning and infinite detuning. For the weakly interacting Bose gases, the first moment is asymmetric in momentum space even at zero detuning, when the ground state spontaneously breaks the Z2 symmetry in the plane-wave condensation phase. Using the Bogoliubov method, the dynamic structure factor and its first moment are explicitly calculated for various interaction parameters. We find that the asymmetric behavior in the spin channel could be much more significant than in the density channel, and the asymmetric amplitude is enhanced as the interaction strength increases. Experimentally, the dynamic structure factors can be directly measured through the two photon Bragg scattering. Numeric simulations show that to observe the deviation of inversion symmetry in the first moment, the resolution of the Bragg spectroscopy should reach a required value. For the typical parameters of the rubidium atomic gas, the required resolution is about 10-2Er with Er being the recoil energy. Our predictions can be tested in the future experiment.
We review our recent experimental realization and investigation of a spin-orbit (SO) coupled Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) and quantum degenerate Fermi gas. By using two counter-propagating Raman lasers and controlling the different frequency of two Raman lasers to engineer the atom-light interaction, we first study the SO coupling in BEC. Then we study SO coupling in Fermi gas. We observe the spin dephasing in spin dynamics and momentum distribution asymmetry of the equilibrium state as hallmarks of SO coupling in a Fermi gas. To clearly reveal the property of SO coupling Fermi gas, we also study the momentum-resolved radio-frequency spectroscopy which characterizes the energy-momentum dispersion and spin composition of the quantum states. We observe the change of fermion surfaces in different helicity branches with different atomic density, which indicates that a Lifshitz transition of the Fermi surface topology change can be found by further cooling the system. At last, we study the momentum-resolved Raman spectroscopy of an ultracold Fermi gas.
We study two-component Bose gases with Raman induced spin-orbit coupling via a perturbation approach at finite temperature. For weak coupling, free energy is expanded in terms of Raman coupling strength up to the second order, where the coefficient (referred to as Raman susceptibility) is determined according to linear response theory. The equation of state for the stripe phase and the plane-wave phase are obtained in Popov approximation, and the first order transition between these two phases is investigated. As temperature increases, we find the phase boundary bends toward the stripe phase side in most temperature regions, which implies the ferromagnetic order is more robust than the crystalline order in presence of thermal fluctuations. Our results qualitatively agree with the recent experimental observation in rubidium atomic gases. A method to measure Raman susceptibility through the two-photon Bragg scattering experiment is also discussed.
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.
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.
We briefly review recent progress on ultracold atomic Fermi gases with different types of synthetic spin-orbit coupling, including the one-dimensional (1D) equal weight Rashba-Dresselhaus and two-dimensional (2D) Rasbha spin-orbit couplings. Theoretically, we show how the single-body, two-body and many-body properties of Fermi gases are dramatically changed by spin-orbit coupling. In particular, the interplay between spin-orbit coupling and interatomic interaction may lead to several long-sought exotic superfluid phases at low temperatures, such as anisotropic superfluid, topological superfluid and inhomogeneous superfluid. Experimentally, only the first type - equal weight combination of Rasbha and Dresselhaus spin-orbit couplings - has been realized very recently using a two-photon Raman process. We show how to characterize a normal spin-orbit coupled atomic Fermi gas in both non-interacting and strongly-interacting limits, using particularly momentum-resolved radio-frequency spectroscopy. The experimental demonstration of a strongly-interacting spin-orbit coupled Fermi gas opens a promising way to observe various exotic superfluid phases in the near future.
We present a theoretical investigation of the dynamic density structure factor of a strongly interacting Fermi gas near the Feshbach resonance at finite temperature, which can be exploited in two photon Bragg scattering experiments. This study is based on a fully gauge invariant linear response theory, which is consistent with a diagrammatic approach for the equilibrium state taking into account the pair fluctuation effects and respects important restrictions like the f -sum rule. At small incoming momentum, the dynamic density structure factor exhibits various features including the Nambu-Goldstone-mode peak and the quasiparticle-scattering, pairing-breaking continua. At large incoming momentum and at half recoil frequency, the structure factor has a qualitatively similar behavior as the order parameter, which can signify the appearance of the condensate. These results qualitatively agree with the recent Bragg spectroscopy experiments.