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arXiv:cond-mat/0609251 · Physical Review A

Collective motions of a quantum gas confined in a harmonic trap

Dae-Yup Song

Published Aug 23, 2005• 3 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Single-component quantum gas confined in a harmonic potential, but otherwise isolated, is considered. From the invariance of the system of the gas under a displacement-type transformation, it is shown that the center of mass oscillates along a classical trajectory of a harmonic oscillator. It is also shown that this harmonic motion of the center has, in fact, been implied by Kohn's theorem. If there is no interaction between the atoms of the gas, the system in a time-independent isotropic potential of frequency ${\ensuremath{\nu}}_{c}$ is invariant under a squeeze-type unitary transformation, which gives collective radial breathing motion of frequency $2{\ensuremath{\nu}}_{c}$ to the gas. The amplitudes of the oscillating and breathing motions from the exact invariances could be arbitrarily large. For a Fermi system, appearance of $2{\ensuremath{\nu}}_{c}$ mode of the large breathing motion indicates that there is no interaction between the atoms, except for a possible long-range interaction through the inverse-square-type potential.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.72.023614

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Acta Physica Sinica•Jan 1, 2012•0 citations
Single-component quantum gas confined in a harmonic potential, but otherwise isolated, is considered. From the invariance of the system of the gas under a displacement-type transformation, it is shown that the center of mass oscillates along a classical trajectory of a harmonic oscillator. It is also shown that this harmonic motion of the center has, in fact, been implied by Kohn's theorem. If there is no interaction between the atoms of the gas, the system in a time-independent isotropic potential of frequency \ensuremathνc{\ensuremath{\nu}}_{c}\ensuremathνc​ is invariant under a squeeze-type unitary transformation, which gives collective radial breathing motion of frequency 2\ensuremathνc2{\ensuremath{\nu}}_{c}2\ensuremathνc​ to the gas. The amplitudes of the oscillating and breathing motions from the exact invariances could be arbitrarily large. For a Fermi system, appearance of 2\ensuremathνc2{\ensuremath{\nu}}_{c}2\ensuremathνc​ mode of the large breathing motion indicates that there is no interaction between the atoms, except for a possible long-range interaction through the inverse-square-type potential.
A scale-invariant two-component Fermi gas in a time-dependent isotropic harmonic potential is investigated. The exact time evolution of the density distribution in position space in any spatial dimension is obtained. Two experimentally relevant examples, an abrupt change and a periodic modulation of the trapping frequency, are solved. Small deviations from scale invariance are addressed within first-order perturbation theory. The consequences for experiments with ultracold quantum gases, such as the excitation of a tower of undamped breathing modes and an alternative for measuring the Tan contact, are discussed.
A unitary Fermi gas in an isotropic harmonic trap is predicted to show scale and conformal symmetry that have important consequences in its thermodynamic and dynamical properties. By experimentally realizing a unitary Fermi gas in an isotropic harmonic trap, we demonstrate its universal expansion dynamics along each direction and at different temperatures. We show that as a consequence of SO(2,1) symmetry, the measured release energy is equal to that of the trapping energy. We further observe the breathing mode with an oscillation frequency twice the trapping frequency and a small damping rate, providing the evidence of SO(2,1) symmetry. In addition, away from resonance when scale invariance is broken, we determine the effective exponent γ that relates the chemical potential and average density along the BEC-BCS crossover, which qualitatively agrees with the mean field predictions. This Letter opens the possibility of studying nonequilibrium dynamics in a conformal invariant system in the future.
We present a theory for the linear dynamics of a weakly interacting Bose gas confined inside a harmonic trap at finite temperature. The theory treats the motions of the condensate and of the noncondensate on an equal footing within a generalized random-phase approximation, which (i) extends the second-order Beliaev-Popov approach by allowing for the dynamical coupling between fluctuations in the thermal cloud, and (ii) reduces to an earlier random-phase scheme when the anomalous density fluctuations are omitted. Numerical calculations of the low-lying spectra in the case of isotropic confinement show that the present theory obeys with high accuracy the generalized Kohn theorem for the dipolar excitations and demonstrate that combined normal and anomalous density fluctuations play an important role in the monopolar excitations of the condensate. Mean-field theory is instead found to yield accurate results for the quadrupolar modes of the condensate. Although the restriction to spherical confinement prevents quantitative comparisons with measured spectra, it appears that the non-mean-field effects that we examine may be relevant to explain the features exhibited by the breathing mode as a function of temperature in the experiments carried out at JILA on a gas of 87Rb^{87}\mathrm{Rb}87Rb atoms.
We investigate the quantum breathing mode (monopole oscillation) of trapped fermionic particles with Coulomb and dipole interaction in one and two dimensions. This collective oscillation has been shown to reveal detailed information on the many-particle state of interacting trapped systems and is thus a sensitive diagnostics for a variety of finite systems, including cold atomic and molecular gases in traps and optical lattices, electrons in metal clusters and in quantum confined semiconductor structures or nanoplasmas. An improved sum rule formalism allows us to accurately determine the breathing frequencies from the ground state of the system, avoiding complicated time-dependent simulations. In combination with the Hartree–Fock and the Thomas–Fermi approximations this enables us to extend the calculations to large particle numbers N on the order of several million. Tracing the breathing frequency to large N as a function of the coupling parameter of the system reveals a surprising difference of the asymptotic behavior of one-dimensional and two-dimensional harmonically trapped Coulomb systems.
SO(2,1) dynamical symmetry makes a remarkable prediction that the breathing oscillation of a scale-invariant quantum gas in an isotropic harmonic trap is isentropic and can persist indefinitely. In two dimensions, this symmetry is broken due to quantum anomaly in the strongly interacting range, and consequently the lifetime of the breathing mode becomes finite. The persistent breather in a strongly interacting system has so far not been realized. Here, we experimentally achieve the long-lived breathing mode in a three-dimensional unitary Fermi gas, which is protected by the SO(2,1) symmetry. The nearly perfect SO(2,1) symmetry is realized by loading the ultracold Fermi gas in an isotropic trap and tuning the interatomic interaction to resonance. The breathing mode oscillates at twice the trapping frequency even for large excitation amplitudes. The ratio of damping rate to oscillation frequency is as small as 0.002, providing an interacting persistent breather. The oscillation frequency and damping rate are nearly constant for different atomic densities and temperatures, demonstrating the robustness of the SO(2,1) symmetry in three dimensions. The factors that lead to the residual damping have also been clarified. This work opens the way to study many-body nonequilibrium dynamics related to the dynamical symmetry.
The collective excitations of a one-dimensional superfluid Fermi gas in an anharmonic trap are investigated. By using the variational approach, the frequency shifts about the dipole mode of the center-of-mass variations and the breathing mode of width variations are derived. It is found that the frequency shift in a unitary region is more significant. Under the excitations of different driving amplitudes, the two low-energy modes are coupled due to the contribution of the quartic item, and the quantum beating phenomenon comes into being. The frequency of beating increases with the driving amplitude. The dynamics of the width exhibits complex characteristics, especially, in the unitary region.