Experimental realization of a Dirac monopole through the decay of an isolated monopole

We experimentally observe the decay dynamics of deterministically created isolated monopoles in spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates. As the condensate undergoes a change between magnetic phases, the isolated monopole gradually evolves into a spin configuration hosting a Dirac monopole in its synthetic magnetic field. We characterize in detail the Dirac monopole by measuring the particle densities of the spin states projected along different quantization axes. Importantly, we observe the spontaneous emergence of nodal lines in the condensate density that accompany the Dirac monopole. We also demonstrate that the monopole decay accelerates in weaker magnetic field gradients.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

A Regularized Newton Method for Computing Ground States of Bose-Einstein condensates

In this paper, we propose a regularized Newton method for computing ground states of Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs), which can be formulated as an energy minimization problem with a spherical constraint. The energy functional and constraint are discretized by either the finite difference, or sine or Fourier pseudospectral discretization schemes and thus the original infinite dimensional nonconvex minimization problem is approximated by a finite dimensional constrained nonconvex minimization problem. Then an initial solution is first constructed by using a feasible gradient type method, which is an explicit scheme and maintains the spherical constraint automatically. To accelerate the convergence of the gradient type method, we approximate the energy functional by its second-order Taylor expansion with a regularized term at each Newton iteration and adopt a cascadic multigrid technique for selecting initial data. It leads to a standard trust-region subproblem and we solve it again by the feasible gradient type method. The convergence of the regularized Newton method is established by adjusting the regularization parameter as the standard trust-region strategy. Extensive numerical experiments on challenging examples, including a BEC in three dimensions with an optical lattice potential and rotating BECs in two dimensions with rapid rotation and strongly repulsive interaction, show that our method is efficient, accurate and robust.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figure

Computing Ground States of Spin-1 Bose-Einstein Condensates by the Normalized Gradient Flow

In this paper, we propose an efficient and accurate numerical method for computing the ground state of spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) by using the normalized gradient flow or imaginary time method. The key idea is to find a third projection or normalization condition based on the relation between the chemical potentials so that the three projection parameters used in the projection step of the normalized gradient flow are uniquely determined by this condition as well as the other two physical conditions given by the conservation of total mass and total magnetization. This allows us to successfully extend the most popular and powerful normalized gradient flow or imaginary time method for computing the ground state of single component BEC to compute the ground state of spin-1 BEC. An efficient and accurate discretization scheme, the backward-forward Euler sine-pseudospectral method (BFSP), is proposed to discretize the normalized gradient flow. Extensive numerical results on ground states of spin-1 BEC with ferromagnetic/antiferromagnetic interaction and harmonic/optical lattice potential in one/three dimensions are reported to demonstrate the efficiency of our new numerical method.Comment: 25 pages, 12 figure

Inert-states of spin-5 and spin-6 Bose-Einstein condensates

In this paper we consider spinor Bose-Einstein condensates with spin f=5 and f=6 in the presence and absence of external magnetic field at the mean field level. We calculate all of so-called inert-states of these systems. Inert-states are very unique class of stationary states because they remain stationary while Hamiltonian parameters change. Their existence comes from Michel's theorem. For illustration of symmetry properties of the inert-states we use method that allows classification of the systems as a polyhedron with 2f vertices proposed by R. Barnett et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 180412 (2006).Comment: 19 pages, 4 figure

Newton-based alternating methods for the ground state of a class of multi-component Bose-Einstein condensates

The computation of the ground states of special multi-component Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) can be formulated as an energy functional minimization problem with spherical constraints. It leads to a nonconvex quartic-quadratic optimization problem after suitable discretizations. First, we generalize the Newton-based methods for single-component BECs to the alternating minimization scheme for multi-component BECs. Second, the global convergent alternating Newton-Noda iteration (ANNI) is proposed. In particular, we prove the positivity preserving property of ANNI under mild conditions. Finally, our analysis is applied to a class of more general "multi-block" optimization problems with spherical constraints. Numerical experiments are performed to evaluate the performance of proposed methods for different multi-component BECs, including pseudo spin-1/2, anti-ferromagnetic spin-1 and spin-2 BECs. These results support our theory and demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithms

Effective field theory for spinor dipolar Bose Einstein condensates

We show that the effective theory of long wavelength low energy behavior of a dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate(BEC) with large dipole moments (treated as a classical spin) can be modeled using an extended Non-linear sigma model (NLSM) like energy functional with an additional non-local term that represents long ranged anisotropic dipole-dipole interaction. Minimizing this effective energy functional we calculate the density and spin-profile of the dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate in the mean-field regime for various trapping geometries. The resulting configurations show strong intertwining between the spin and mass density of the condensate, transfer between spin and orbital angular momentum in the form of Einstein-de Hass effect, and novel topological properties. We have also described the theoretical framework in which the collective excitations around these mean field solutions can be studied and discuss some examples qualitatively.Comment: Latex + 3 eps figures, accepted for publication in a special issue of EPJB on "Novel Quantum Phases and Mesoscopic Physics in Quantum Gases