Defect-Suppressed Atomic Crystals in an Optical Lattice

We present a coherent filtering scheme which dramatically reduces the site occupation number defects for atoms in an optical lattice, by transferring a chosen number of atoms to a different internal state via adiabatic passage. With the addition of superlattices it is possible to engineer states with a specific number of atoms per site (atomic crystals), which are required for quantum computation and the realisation of models from condensed matter physics, including doping and spatial patterns. The same techniques can be used to measure two-body spatial correlation functions. We illustrate these ideas with a scheme to study the creation of a BCS state with a chosen filling factor from a degenerate Fermi gas in an optical lattice.Comment: 4 Pages, 5 Figures, REVTex

Dissipative dynamics of vortex arrays in trapped Bose-condensed gases: neutron stars physics on μ\muK scale

We develop a theory of dissipative dynamics of large vortex arrays in trapped Bose-condensed gases. We show that in a static trap the interaction of the vortex array with thermal excitations leads to a non-exponential decay of the vortex structure, and the characteristic lifetime depends on the initial density of vortices. Drawing an analogy with physics of pulsar glitches, we propose an experiment which employs the heating of the thermal cloud in the course of the decay of the vortex array as a tool for a non-destructive study of the vortex dynamics.Comment: 4 pages, revtex; revised versio