We show that the ground state of a spin-1 Bose gas with an antiferromagnetic interaction is a fragmented condensate in uniform magnetic fields. The number fluctuations in each spin component change rapidly from being enormous (order N) to exceedingly small (order 1) as the magnetization of the system increases. A fragmented condensate can be turned into a single condensate state by magnetic field gradients. The conditions for existence and method of detecting fragmented states are presented.
We show that the ground state of a spin-1 Bose gas with an antiferromagnetic interaction is a fragmented condensate in uniform magnetic fields. The number fluctuations in each spin component change rapidly from being enormous (order N) to exceedingly small (order 1) as the magnetization of the system increases. A fragmented condensate can be turned into a single condensate state by magnetic field gradients. The conditions for existence and method of detecting fragmented states are presented.
We study ground-state quantum fragmentation in a mixture of a polar condensate and a ferromagnetic condensate when subjected to an external magnetic field. We pay more attention to the polar condensate, due to the fact that fragmentation of a polar condensate, which typically occurs only in a very weak magnetic field, can occur in a mixture at higher magnetic fields, where both atom numbers and number fluctuations will remain of a macroscopic magnitude, of the order of N. The role of the ferromagnetic condensate is to provide a uniform and stable background which can delay the rapid shrinkage of the zero-component population and make it possible to capture ``superfragmentation.'' Our method has potential applications in measurement of the interspecies spin-coupling interaction by adjusting the magnetic field.
We study spin fragmentation of an antiferromagnetic spin 1 condensate in the presence of a quadratic Zeeman (QZ) effect breaking spin rotational symmetry. We describe how the QZ effect turns a fragmented spin state, with large fluctuations of the Zeeman populations, into a regular polar condensate, where the atoms all condense in the m = 0 state along the field direction. We calculate the average value and variance of the population of the Zeeman state m = 0 to illustrate clearly the crossover from a fragmented to an unfragmented state. The typical width of this crossover is q ∼ k B T / N , where q is the QZ energy, T the spin temperature and N the atom number. This shows that the spin fluctuations are a mesoscopic effect that will not survive in the thermodynamic limit N → ∞ , but are observable for a sufficiently small atom number.
Weakly interacting Bose gases usually form Bose-Einstein condensates in which most particles occupy the same single-particle state. However, when this state cannot realize a continuous symmetry of the many-body Hamiltonian, a fragmented condensate exhibiting the expected symmetry may emerge. Here, we produced a three-fragment condensate for a mesoscopic spin-1 gas of about 100 atoms, with anti-ferromagnetic interactions and vanishing collective spin. Using a spin-resolved detection approaching single-atom resolution, we show that the reconstructed state is close to the expected many-body ground state, whereas one-body observables are the same as for a completely mixed state. Our results highlight how the interplay between symmetry and interactions generates entanglement in a mesoscopic quantum system.
In this thesis, we present some experiments realized with ultracold gases of sodium atoms, trapped at the intersect between two laser beams. At very low temperature, the discretization of energy and the indistinguishability of particles, lead to a new state of matter, a Bose-Einstein condensate. This remarkable phenomenon was initially introduced to describe an ideal gas, that is to say with no interactions between its constituents. Here, we are interested in the effects of the interactions between the atoms. More precisely, our atoms carry a spin 1, and we focus on the collective spin state, in a regime where the spatial degrees of freedom are frozen. Two important results that we present were obtained by embedding the condensate in a nearly vanishing magnetic field. In that regime, interactions dominate and favor the emergence of strongly correlated states. In a first series of experiment, the magnetic field is suddenly decreased to bring the system out-of-equilibrium. The ensuing relaxation dynamics leads to a stationnary state that can be well described by a Gibbs ensemble. In a second experiment, the field is slowly reduced, in order to follow the ground state of the system. We thereby produce a fragmented condensate, which possesses the remarkable feature of being invariant upon spin rotations. The restoration of this symmetry, always broken by single (i.e. nonfragmented) condensates, is driven by the pairing of atoms in singlet states.
We discuss the quantum phases and their diffusion dynamics in a spinor-1 atomic Bose-Einstein condensate. For ferromagnetic interactions, we obtain the exact ground-state distribution of the phases associated with the total atom number (N), the total magnetization (M), and the alignment (or hypercharge) (Y) of the system. The mean-field ground state is stable against fluctuations of atom numbers in each of the spin components, and the phases associated with the order parameter for each spin components diffuse while dynamically recovering the two broken continuous symmetries [U(1) and SO(2)] when N and M are conserved, as in current experiments. We discuss the implications to the quantum dynamics due to an external (homogeneous) magnetic field. We also comment on the case of a spinor-1 condensate with antiferromagnetic interactions.
The fragmentation of spin-orbit-coupled spin-1 Bose gas with a weak interaction in external harmonic trap is explored by both exact diagonalization and mean-field theory. This fragmentation tendency, which originates from the total angular momentum conservation, is affected obviously by the spin-orbit-coupling strength and the spin-dependent interaction. Strong spin-orbit interaction raises the inverse participation ratio, which describes the number of significantly occupied single-particle states. As the spin-dependent interaction changes from antiferromagnetic to ferromagnetic, the peak values in the inverse participation ratio become lower. Without the confinement of the appointed total angular momentum, the condensate chooses a zero or finite total angular momentum ground state, which is determined by both the interaction and the spin-orbit-coupling strength.