Fundamentals of BEC Weakly Interacting Bose Gas Trapped System Superfluidity Spinor BEC Dipolar BEC Vortices Fermionic Superfluidity Low-Dimensional Systems Optical Lattice BEC and Topology Outlook.
Spinor Bose Einstein Condensates are intriguing because of their vast range of different topological vortices. These states occur when a BEC gas is trapped in an optical lattice rather than in a magnetic well (which would result in scalar BEC vortices). A spinor BEC states also occur in a quantum gas when several hyperfine states of the atom co-exist in the same trap. A unitary quantum lattice algorithm that is ideally parallelized to all available processors is used to solve the evolution of non-eigenstate Skyrmions in a coupled BEC system. The incompressible kinetic energy spectrum of the inner quantum vortex ring core rapidly deviates from the k-3 spectrum found in the evolution of scalar BECs.
For many years, 4He typified Bose-Einstein superfluids, but recent advances in dilute ultra-cold alkali-metal gases have provided new neutral superfluids that are particularly tractable because the system is dilute. This chapter starts with a brief review of the physics of superfluid 4He, followed by the basic ideas of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC), first for an ideal Bose gas and then considering the effect of interparticle interactions, including time-dependent phenomena. Extensions to more exotic condensates include magnetic dipolar gases, mixtures of two components, and spinor condensates that require a focused infrared laser for trapping of all the various hyperfine magnetic states in a particular hyperfine F manifold of mF states. With an applied rotation, the trapped BECs nucleate quantized vortices. Recent theory and experiment have shown that laser coupling fields can mimic the effect of rotation. The resulting synthetic gauge fields have produced vortices in a nonrotating condensate.
The recent creation of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of dipolar molecules has opened a new frontier for many-body quantum systems in which dipolar interactions can drive novel self-organization phenomena. Here, we observe electrostriction in a molecular BEC, an elliptical deformation driven by anisotropic dipolar interactions. We use double microwave dressing, involving σ- and π-polarized fields, to control non-axially symmetric dipolar interactions. We compare the experimental observations of electrostriction to a model based on an extended Gross-Pitaevskii equation and find excellent agreement in the regime of weak to moderate interactions. Using electrostriction, we demonstrate that the molecular BEC can be torqued by dynamically changing the orientation of the elliptical σ microwave field. This provides a route to setting molecular quantum gases into rotation, opening opportunities to probe vorticity, superfluidity, and supersolidity in strongly dipolar matter.