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arXiv:cond-mat/0610512 · Physical Review A

Symmetry breaking in small rotating clouds of trapped ultracold Bose atoms

Daniel Dagnino, N. Barberán, Klaus Osterloh, Arnau Riera, Maciej Lewenstein

Published Jul 25, 2007• 14 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We study the signatures of rotational and phase symmetry breaking in small rotating clouds of trapped ultracold Bose atoms by looking at rigorously defined condensate wave function. Rotational symmetry breaking occurs in narrow frequency windows, where energy degeneracy between the lowest energy states of different total angular momentum takes place. This leads to a complex condensate wave function that exhibits vortices clearly seen as holes in the density, as well as characteristic local phase patterns, reflecting the appearance of vorticities. Phase symmetry (or gauge symmetry) breaking, on the other hand, is clearly manifested in the interference of two independent rotating clouds.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.76.013625

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We study the signatures of rotational and phase symmetry breaking in small rotating clouds of trapped ultracold Bose atoms by looking at rigorously defined condensate wave function. Rotational symmetry breaking occurs in narrow frequency windows, where energy degeneracy between the lowest energy states of different total angular momentum takes place. This leads to a complex condensate wave function that exhibits vortices clearly seen as holes in the density, as well as characteristic local phase patterns, reflecting the appearance of vorticities. Phase symmetry (or gauge symmetry) breaking, on the other hand, is clearly manifested in the interference of two independent rotating clouds.
The properties of a special class of correlated many-body wave functions, named rotating vortex clusters (RVCs), that preserve the total angular momentum of a small cloud of trapped rotating bosons are investigated. They have lower energy and provide a superior description for the formation of vortices compared to the mean-field Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) states that break the rotational symmetry. The GP vortex states are shown to be wave packets composed of such RVC states. Our results suggest that, for a small number of bosons, the physics is different from that of ideal Bose-Einstein condensates which characterize larger assemblies.
We study a rotating Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) trapped in a shifted harmonic oscillator and Mexican Hat trap, which approximates the potential of a bubble trap potential in some situations.We determined the vortices configurations that appears in this system by varying the interaction and angular momentum of the atomic cloud.The system phase diagram has the macrovortex configurations for small values of the interaction parameter.The charge of the central vortex increases with increasing rotation.Higher values of the atomic interaction turns the macrovortex unstable.It decays into multiple single-charged vortices that arrange themselves in a lattice.Since the vortices are not always visible in the absorption images, we look for alternative methods to characterize the vortex configuration.More specifically, we search for experimental signatures to determine the transitions in the phase diagram.For that, we study how the BEC's velocity field affects the collective modes of the condensate.The splitting of the modes degenerescence and the increase in the mode frequency with angular velocity, which can be traced to a reduction in the gas compressibility, can be seen as an indirect signature of the presence of the vortices in the trapped BEC.
In this dissertation, we study rotational properties of ultracold bosonic quantum gases in two trapped configurations, a quasi-two-dimensional gas in a harmonic trap and a quasi-one-dimensional gas in a toroidal trap. First, we investigate the effects of correlations on the properties of the ground state of the rotating harmonically-trapped Bose gas by adding Bogoliubov fluctuations to the mean-field ground state of an N-particle single-vortex system. We demonstrate that the fluctuation-induced correlations lower the energy compared to that of the mean-field ground state, that the vortex core is pushed slightly away from the center of the trap, and that an unstable mode with negative energy (for rotations slower than a critical frequency) emerges in the energy spectrum, thus, pointing to a better state for slow rotation. We construct mean-field ground states of 0-, 1-, and 2-vortex states as a function of rotation rate and determine the critical frequencies for transitions between these states, as well as the critical frequency for appearance of a metastable state with an off-center vortex and its image vortex in the evanescent tail of the cloud. Then, we show how the configuration-space form of the above-mentioned Bogoliubov ground-state wave function of a bosonic condensate with a single vortex in a harmonic trap can be described in terms of bosonic Jastrow correlations. We then generalize this result to study the effects of such correlations on a mean-field vortex lattice state and show that the included correlations lower the energy below that of the mean-field state. Although the reduction is relatively small, it is a precursor of the more general expected effect of correlations in describing the melting of the vortex lattice at a high angular momentum per particle. Finally, we study the stability and dynamics of an ultracold bosonic gas trapped in a toroidal geometry and driven by rotation in the absence of dissipation. We first delineate, via the Bogoliubov mode expansion, the regions of stability and the nature of instabilities of the system for both repulsive and attractive interaction strengths. To study the response of the system to variations in the rotation rate, we introduce a “disorder” potential, breaking the rotational symmetry. We demonstrate the breakdown of adiabaticity as the rotation rate is slowly varied and find forced tunneling between the eigenstates of the system. The nonadiabaticity is signaled by the appearance of a swallow-tail loop in the lowest-energy level, a general sign of hysteresis. Then, we show that this system is in one-to-one correspondence with a trapped gas in a double-well potential and thus exhibits macroscopic quantum self-trapping. Finally, we show that self-trapping is a direct manifestation of the behavior of the lowest-energy level.
The Bose-Einstein condensates of alkali atomic gases are spinor fields with local ``spin-gauge'' symmetry. This symmetry is manifested by a superfluid velocity us{\mathbf{u}}_{s}us​ (or gauge field) generated by the Berry phase of the spin field. In ``static'' traps, us{\mathbf{u}}_{s}us​ splits the degeneracy of the harmonic energy levels, breaks the inversion symmetry of the vortex nucleation frequency ${\mathbf{\ensuremath{\Omega}}}_{c1}$, and can lead to vortex ground states.
Two-dimentional systems of trapped samples of few cold bosonic atoms submitted to strong rotation around the perpendicular axis may be realized in optical lattices and microtraps. We investigate theoretically the evolution of ground state structures of such systems as the rotational frequency $\ensuremath{\Omega}$ increases. Various kinds of ordered structures are observed. In some cases, hidden interference patterns exhibit themselves only in the pair correlation function; in some other cases explicit broken-symmetry structures appear that modulate the density. For N<10N<10N<10 atoms, the standard scenario, valid for large sytems is absent, and is only gradually recovered as NNN increases. On the one hand, the Laughlin state in the strong rotational regime contains ordered structures much more similar to a Wigner molecule than to a fermionic quantum liquid. On the other hand, in the weak rotational regime, the possibility to obtain equilibrium states, whose density reveals an array of vortices, is restricted to the vicinity of some critical values of the rotational frequency $\ensuremath{\Omega}$.
Bose gases in rotating optical lattices combine two important topics in quantum physics: superfluid rotation and strong correlations. In this paper, we examine square two-dimensional systems at zero temperature comprised of strongly repulsive bosons with filling factors of up to one atom per lattice site. The entry of vortices into the system is characterized by jumps of $2\ensuremath{\pi}$ in the phase winding of the condensate wave function. A lattice of size $L\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}L$ can have at most $L\ensuremath{-}1$ quantized vortices in the lowest Bloch band. In contrast to homogeneous systems, angular momentum is not a good quantum number since the continuous rotational symmetry is broken by the lattice. Instead, a quasiangular momentum captures the discrete rotational symmetry of the system. Energy level crossings indicative of quantum phase transitions are observed when the quasiangular momentum of the ground state changes.