Quasiparticle Berry curvature and Chern numbers in spin-orbit coupled bosonic Mott insulators

We study the ground-state topology and quasiparticle properties in bosonic Mott insulators with two- dimensional spin-orbit couplings in cold atomic optical lattices. We show that the many-body Chern and spin-Chern number can be expressed as an integral of the quasihole Berry curvatures over the Brillouin zone. Using a strong-coupling perturbation theory, for an experimentally feasible spin-orbit coupling, we compute the Berry curvature and the spin Chern number and find that these quantities can be generated purely by interactions. We also compute the quasiparticle dispersions, spectral weights, and the quasimomentum space distribution of particle and spin density, which can be accessed in cold-atom experiments and used to deduce the Berry curvature and Chern numbers

Many-body aspects of coherent atom-molecule oscillations

We study the many-body effects on coherent atom-molecule oscillations by means of an effective quantum field theory that describes Feshbach-resonant interactions in Bose gases in terms of an atom-molecule hamiltonian. We determine numerically the many-body corrections to the oscillation frequency for various densities of the atomic condensate. We also derive an analytic expression that approximately describes both the density and magnetic-field dependence of this frequency near the resonance. We find excellent agreement with experiment.Comment: 4 pages, revtex 4, v2: minor changes: corrected some typos/omissions, Discarded use of the term 'Rabi frequency' to avoid confusio

Microscopic many-body theory of atomic Bose gases near a Feshbach resonance

A Feshbach resonance in the s-wave scattering length occurs if the energy of the two atoms in the incoming open channel is close to the energy of a bound state in a coupled closed channel. Starting from the microscopic hamiltonian that describes this situation, we derive the effective atom-molecule theory for a Bose gas near a Feshbach resonance. In order to take into account all two-body processes, we have to dress the bare couplings of the atom-molecule model with ladder diagrams. This results in a quantum field theory that exactly reproduces the scattering amplitude of the atoms and the bound-state energy of the molecules. Since these properties are incorporated at the quantum level, the theory can be applied both above and below the critical temperature of the gas. Moreover, making use of the true interatomic potentials ensures that no divergences are encountered at any stage of the calculation. We also present the mean-field theory for the Bose-Einstein condensed phase of the gas.Comment: Submitted to the Journal of Optics B special issue on the 7th International Workshop on Atom Optics and Interferometr

Quantum vortex dynamics in two-dimensional neutral superfluids

We derive an effective action for the vortex position degree-of-freedom in a superfluid by integrating out condensate phase and density fluctuation environmental modes. When the quantum dynamics of environmental fluctuations is neglected, we confirm the occurrence of the vortex Magnus force and obtain an expression for the vortex mass. We find that this adiabatic approximation is valid only when the superfluid droplet radius $R$, or the typical distance between vortices, is very much larger than the coherence length $\xi$. We go beyond the adiabatic approximation numerically, accounting for the quantum dynamics of environmental modes and capturing their dissipative coupling to condensate dynamics. For the case of an optical-lattice superfluid we demonstrate that vortex motion damping can be adjusted by tuning the ratio between the tunneling energy $J$ and the on-site interaction energy $U$. We comment on the possibility of realizing vortex Landau level physics.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, accepted by PRA with corrected references and typo

Hydrodynamic modes of partially condensed Bose mixtures

We generalize the Landau-Khalatnikov hydrodynamic theory for superfluid helium to two-component (binary) Bose mixtures at arbitrary temperatures. In particular, we include the spin-drag terms that correspond to viscous coupling between the clouds. Therefore, our theory not only describes the usual collective modes of the individual components, e.g., first and second sound, but also results in new collective modes, where both constituents participate. We study these modes in detail and present their dispersions using thermodynamic quantities obtained within the Popov approximation

Quantitative Probe of Pairing Correlations in a Cold Fermionic Atom Gas

A quantitative measure of the pairing correlations present in a cold gas of fermionic atoms can be obtained by studying the dependence of RF spectra on hyperfine state populations. This proposal follows from a sum rule that relates the total interaction energy of the gas to RF spectrum line positions. We argue that this indicator of pairing correlations provides information comparable to that available from the spin-susceptibility and NMR measurements common in condensed-matter systems.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

Schwinger-Keldysh theory for Bose-Einstein condensation of photons in a dye-filled optical microcavity

We consider Bose-Einstein condensation of photons in an optical cavity filled with dye molecules that are excited by laser light. By using the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism we derive a Langevin field equation that describes the dynamics of the photon gas, and in particular its equilibrium properties and relaxation towards equilibrium. Furthermore we show that the finite lifetime effects of the photons are captured in a single dimensionless damping parameter, that depends on the power of the external laser pumping the dye. Finally, as applications of our theory we determine spectral functions and collective modes of the photon gas in both the normal and the Bose-Einstein condensed phase