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Il Colle di Galileo

The supersolid phase of matter

Giovanni Carlo Modugno

Published Sep 21, 2021• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The supersolid is a phase of matter intermediate between a crystal and a superfluid. It was predicted more than fifty years ago, long sought in solid helium and only recently discovered in a quantum gas of magnetic atoms. This article explains how we came to discover the supersolid, how some surprising properties have already been characterized and which others have still to be unveiled.

DOI
10.36253/cdg-13088

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The supersolid is a phase of matter intermediate between a crystal and a superfluid. It was predicted more than fifty years ago, long sought in solid helium and only recently discovered in a quantum gas of magnetic atoms. This article explains how we came to discover the supersolid, how some surprising properties have already been characterized and which others have still to be unveiled.
Supersolids-the enigmatic phase of quantum matter, with properties resembling both the superfluid and solid states-have been actively sought over the past 70 years. We provide a comprehensive review of the developments to date in experimental and theoretical studies of the supersolid phases of bosons, with a particular focus on their observation in ultracold atomic gases. Additionally, the use of optical lattices facilitates the realization of 'lattice-supersolids', which paves the way to study the effect of correlations in a controlled manner. A brief theoretical framework is presented to characterize this puzzling state with competing orders and to gain insight into its basic properties. Various types of supersolid phases and the different platforms used to achieve them are described. Finally, we discuss the future prospects of research and the potential to achieve supersolids with more exotic features.
Abstract Supersolid states simultaneously feature properties typically associated with a solid and with a superfluid. Like a solid, they possess crystalline order, manifesting as a periodic modulation of the particle density; but unlike a typical solid, they also have superfluid properties, resulting from coherent particle delocalization across the system. Such states were initially envisioned in the context of bulk solid helium, as a possible answer to the question of whether a solid could have superfluid properties1–5. Although supersolidity has not been observed in solid helium (despite much effort)6, ultracold atomic gases provide an alternative approach, recently enabling the observation and study of supersolids with dipolar atoms7–16. However, unlike the proposed phenomena in helium, these gaseous systems have so far only shown supersolidity along a single direction. Here we demonstrate the extension of supersolid properties into two dimensions by preparing a supersolid quantum gas of dysprosium atoms on both sides of a structural phase transition similar to those occurring in ionic chains17–20, quantum wires21, 22 and theoretically in chains of individual dipolar particles23, 24. This opens the possibility of studying rich excitation properties25–28, including vortex formation29–31, and ground-state phases with varied geometrical structure7, 32 in a highly flexible and controllable system.
The elusive supersolid, an exotic quantum phase that combines the properties of a crystalline solid and those of a superfluid, has been recently discovered in a system of Bose-condensed strongly magnetic atoms. In this paper, I report on an experiment that directly demonstrates the superfluid behavior of the dipolar supersolid measuring its anomalous response to a rotational excitation. I complement the illustration of the experimental results with a review and an original interpretation of a seminal model due to Leggett.
Cooling a Thermal Cloud to a SupersolidWhen a cloud of cold atoms goes through a supersolid phase transition, its coexisting superfluid and crystalline phases do not emerge simultaneously.By Chinmayee Mishra O bserving a supersolid-a state of matter that has both superfluid and solid properties-has been a challenge for decades.The constituent particles of a supersolid form a rigid, ordered structure but can also flow without dissipating energy.This paradoxical behavior was observed in cold-atom experiments only in the last five years [1-5].Researchers typically make cold-atom supersolids starting from superfluid phases, leaving open the question of how supersolidity appears from other phases.Now, a team led by Francesca Ferlaino at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, has shown that when starting from a thermal gas, a supersolid's crystalline and superfluid orders arrive and decay sequentually
Supersolids are a fundamental quantum phase of matter where the global phase and translational symmetries are spontaneously broken.The recently discovered supersolidity in quantum gases of strongly magnetic atoms gives the opportunity to explore in depth how superfluidity and crystalline order are mixed in this fascinating phase.The dipolar supersolid is usually created from a Bose-Einstein condensate, i.e., a standard superfluid, crossing a quantum phase transition that is related to the crystallization transitions of ordinary matter.In this work, we assess experimentally and theoretically the character of the superfluidsupersolid quantum phase transition.We find that one-row supersolids can have already two types of phase transitions, discontinuous and continuous, that are reminiscent of the first-and second-order transitions predicted in the thermodynamic limit in 2D and 1D, respectively.The dimensional crossover is peculiar to supersolids, is controlled via the transverse confinement and the atom number, and can be justified on the general ground of the Landau theory of phase transitions.The quasiadiabatic crossing of a continuous phase transition opens new directions of investigation for supersolids.