We study the ground state and classify its phase diagram for a mixture of two spin-1 condensates in the absence of an external magnetic
(B) field according to atomic parameters for intra- and interspecies spin-exchange coupling and singlet-pairing interaction. Ignoring the interspecies singlet-pairing interaction, the ground-state phases are found analytically. A numerical approach of simulated annealing is adopted when the singlet-pairing interaction is present. Our results on the phase diagram and the boundaries between phases allow for easy identifications of quantum phase transitions, which can be induced through the tuning of optical traps and atom numbers. They provide insight and guidance for several ongoing experiments on mixtures of spinor condensates.
The achievement in cooling alkali atomic gases, such as
87Rb,
23Na and
7Li, to quantum degeneracy opens up a way to study magnetism in spinor bosons, because these constituent atoms usually have a hyperfine spin degree of freedom. This article reviews several basic problems related to the ferromagnetic phase transition in spinor atomic Bose gases from a theoretical perspective. After a brief discussion on various possible origins of the ferromagnetic interaction, the phase diagram of the ferromagnetically coupled spinor bosons is investigated. It is found that the ferromagnetic transition occurs always above Bose-Einstein condensation and the Bose condensate is fully polarized. The low-lying collective excitations of the spinor condensate, including spin and density modes, are discussed. The spectrum of the density mode is of the Bogliubov form and the spin wave spectrum has a
k2-formed dispersion relation at long wavelengths. The spin-wave stiffness coefficient contains contribut
Ultra-cold spinor Bose gases present rich physics due to the special combination of superfluidity and magnetism in a quantum system. This system was first realized in 1998 by confining a Bose-Einstein condensate in an all-optical trap.\nIn this thesis, we consider the fluctuations of observable quantities in a spin-1 Bose gas. Understanding how fluctuations arise due to the spin excitations of the condensate is important because it offers an insight into how measurement noise reveals the many-body physics of the system.\nTo begin, we present the mean-field and Bogoliubov theory of a uniform spin-1 Bose gas subject to a constant magnetic field, describing the condensate and its low-energy collective excitations.\nWe then develop a formalism to describe the fluctuations in a general density-like observable. We start from the two-point correlation function and cast it in the form of a generalised static structure factor determined by the three Bogoliubov quasiparticle excitation branches. We derive analytic results for the fluctuation amplitudes and the temperature-dependent static structure factors for observables of total density and the three spin densities.\nFor all four magnetic phases, we analyse the spinor order parameter and quasiparticle spectra while numerically mapping out the fluctuation amplitudes and static structure factors for the total and spin density operators.\nWe describe the fluctuations in experimental measurements made within finite cells, which is an important step to making meaningful predictions for experiments. We consider cylindrical cells and gaussian cells as two limiting cases. We apply this analysis to an experimentally realisable system of a quasi-2D spinor gas in a harmonic trap, comparing extensive numeric results with analytic limits.
Bose Einstein condensates of spin-1 atoms are known to exist in two different phases, both having spontaneously broken spin-rotation symmetry, a ferromagnetic and a polar condensate. Here we show that in two spatial dimensions it is possible to achieve a quantum phase transition from a polar condensate into a singlet phase symmetric under rotations in spin space. This can be done by using particle density as a tuning parameter. Starting from the polar phase at high density the system can be tuned into a strong-coupling intermediate-density point where the phase transition into a symmetric phase takes place. By further reducing the particle density the symmetric phase can be continuously deformed into a Bose-Einstein condensate of singlet atomic pairs. We calculate the region of the parameter space where such a molecular phase is stable against collapse.
In this thesis, we study theoretically and in experimentally the properties of spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates with antiferromagnetic interactions realized in the ultra-cold sodium gases confined in optical dipole traps. We present in detail how to realize, diagnose and control the spinor Bose-Einstein condensates in our experiment. In order to describe the condensate, a mean-field theory is first adopted. This theory predicts a phase transition when changing the magnetic field
B. The predictions of the mean-field theory agree very well with most of our experimental results, including the values of the critical magnetic field
Bc, asymptotic values of
n0 (relative atom number in
mF=0 state) at large
B and the phase diagram of
n0. However, for small magnetization and small magnetic fields, we find abnormally large fluctuations (super-Poissonian) of
n0. In order to describe these large fluctuations, we develop a full quantum statistical description for the spinor condensate at finite temperature. To describe uncondensed thermal atoms (also present in the same trap), we use the ``semi-ideal" Hartree-Fock approximation to deal with the interactions between the condensate atoms and the thermal ones. The experimental results lead us to introduce two kinds of temperatures, the ``spin temperature"
Ts and the ``kinetic temperature"
Tk with
Ts≪Tk, characterizing respectively the fluctuaitons of the condensate spin and the thermal gas. We conclude that the system is reaching a quasi-equilibrium states, where different degrees of freedom reach equilibrium by separate mechanisms but where the mutual thermalization does not occur over the lifetime of the cloud.