Cooper pairing and single particle properties of trapped Fermi gases

We calculate the elementary excitations and pairing of a trapped atomic Fermi gas in the superfluid phase. The level spectra and pairing gaps undergo several transitions as the strength of the interactions between and the number of atoms are varied. For weak interactions, the Cooper pairs are formed between particles residing in the same harmonic oscillator shell. In this regime, the nature of the paired state is shown to depend critically on the position of the chemical potential relative to the harmonic oscillator shells and on the size of the mean field. For stronger interactions, we find a region where pairing occur between time-reversed harmonic oscillator states in different shells also.Comment: Slightly revised version: Mistakes in equation references in figures corrected. Accepted for Phys. Rev.

Perturbative spectrum of Trapped Weakly Interacting Bosons in Two Dimensions

We study a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate under rotation in the limit of weak, translational and rotational invariant two-particle interactions. We use the perturbation-theory approach (the large-N expansion) to calculate the ground-state energy and the excitation spectrum in the asymptotic limit where the total number of particles N goes to infinity while keeping the total angular momentum L finite. Calculating the probabilities of different configurations of angular momentum in the exact eigenstates gives us a clear view of the physical content of excitations. We briefly discuss the case of repulsive contact interaction.Comment: Revtex, 10 pages, 1 table, to appear in Phys. Rev.

Low-Lying Excitations from the Yrast Line of Weakly Interacting Trapped Bosons

Through an extensive numerical study, we find that the low-lying, quasi-degenerate eigenenergies of weakly-interacting trapped N bosons with total angular momentum L are given in case of small L/N and sufficiently small L by E = L hbar omega + g[N(N-L/2-1)+1.59 n(n-1)/2], where omega is the frequency of the trapping potential and g is the strength of the repulsive contact interaction; the last term arises from the pairwise repulsive interaction among n octupole excitations and describes the lowest-lying excitation spectra from the Yrast line. In this case, the quadrupole modes do not interact with themselves and, together with the octupole modes, exhaust the low-lying spectra which are separated from others by N-linear energy gaps.Comment: 5 pages, RevTeX, 2 figures, revised version, submitted to PR

Low-lying excitations of a trapped rotating Bose-Einstein condensate

We investigate the low-lying excitations of a weakly-interacting, harmonically-trapped Bose-Einstein condensed gas under rotation, in the limit where the angular mometum $L$ of the system is much less than the number of the atoms $N$ in the trap. We show that in the asymptotic limit $N \to \infty$ the excitation energy, measured from the energy of the lowest state, is given by $27 N_{3}(N_{3}-1) v_0 /68$, where $N_{3}$ is the number of octupole excitations and $v_{0}$ is the unit of the interaction energy.Comment: 3 pages, RevTex, 2 ps figures, submitted to PR

Multiply quantized vortices in trapped Bose-Einstein condensates

Vortex configurations in rotating Bose-Einstein condensed gases trapped in power-law and anharmonic potentials are studied. When the confining potential is steeper than harmonic in the plane perpendicular to the axis of rotation, vortices with quantum numbers larger than one are energetically favorable if the interaction is weak enough. Features of the wave function for small and intermediate rotation frequencies are investigated numerically.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures. Revised and extended article following referee repor

Free expansion of Bose-Einstein condensates with quantized vortices

The expansion of Bose-Einstein condensates with quantized vortices is studied by solving numerically the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation at zero temperature. For a condensate initially trapped in a spherical harmonic potential, we confirm previous results obtained by means of variational methods showing that, after releasing the trap, the vortex core expands faster than the radius of the atomic cloud. This could make the detection of vortices feasible, by observing the depletion of the density along the axis of rotation. We find that this effect is significantly enhanced in the case of anisotropic disc-shaped traps. The results obtained as a function of the anisotropy of the initial configuration are compared with the analytic solution for a noninteracting gas in 3D as well as with the scaling law predicted for an interacting gas in 2D.Comment: 5 pages, 6 postscript figure

On phases in weakly interacting finite Bose systems

We study precursors of thermal phase transitions in finite systems of interacting Bose gases. For weakly repulsive interactions there is a phase transition to the one-vortex state. The distribution of zeros of the partition function indicates that this transition is first order, and the precursors of the phase transition are already displayed in systems of a few dozen bosons. Systems of this size do not exhibit new phases as more vortices are added to the system.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure

Operator-Algebraic Approach to the Yrast Spectrum of Weakly Interacting Trapped Bosons

We present an operator-algebraic approach to deriving the low-lying quasi-degenerate spectrum of weakly interacting trapped N bosons with total angular momentum \hbar L for the case of small L/N, demonstrating that the lowest-lying excitation spectrum is given by 27 g n_3(n_3-1)/34, where g is the strength of the repulsive contact interaction and n_3 the number of excited octupole quanta. Our method provides constraints for these quasi-degenerate many-body states and gives higher excitation energies that depend linearly on N.Comment: 7 pages, one figur

Splitting of a doubly quantized vortex through intertwining in Bose-Einstein condensates

The stability of doubly quantized vortices in dilute Bose-Einstein condensates of 23Na is examined at zero temperature. The eigenmode spectrum of the Bogoliubov equations for a harmonically trapped cigar-shaped condensate is computed and it is found that the doubly quantized vortex is spectrally unstable towards dissection into two singly quantized vortices. By numerically solving the full three-dimensional time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation, it is found that the two singly quantized vortices intertwine before decaying. This work provides an interpretation of recent experiments [A. E. Leanhardt et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 190403 (2002)].Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures (to be published in PRA

Some exact results for a trapped quantum gas at finite temperature

We present closed analytical expressions for the particle and kinetic energy spatial densities at finite temperatures for a system of noninteracting fermions (bosons) trapped in a d-dimensional harmonic oscillator potential. For d=2 and 3, exact expressions for the N-particle densities are used to calculate perturbatively the temperature dependence of the splittings of the energy levels in a given shell due to a very weak interparticle interaction in a dilute Fermi gas. In two dimensions, we obtain analytically the surprising result that the |l|-degeneracy in a harmonic oscillator shell is not lifted in the lowest order even when the exact, rather than the Thomas-Fermi expression for the particle density is used. We also demonstrate rigorously (in two dimensions) the reduction of the exact zero-temperature fermionic expressions to the Thomas-Fermi form in the large-N limit.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures include