Metastable Quantum Phase Transitions in a One-Dimensional Bose Gas

This is a chapter for a book. The first paragraph of this chapter is as follows: "Ultracold quantum gases offer a wonderful playground for quantum many body physics, as experimental systems are widely controllable, both statically and dynamically. One such system is the one-dimensional (1D) Bose gas on a ring. In this system binary contact interactions between the constituent bosonic atoms, usually alkali metals, can be controlled in both sign and magnitude; a recent experiment has tuned interactions over seven orders of magnitude, using an atom-molecule resonance called a Feshbach resonance. Thus one can directly realize the Lieb-Liniger Hamiltonian, from the weakly- to the strongly-interacting regime. At the same time there are a number of experiments utilizing ring traps. The ring geometry affords us the opportunity to study topological properties of this system as well; one of the main properties of a superfluid is the quantized circulation in which the average angular momentum per particle, L/N, is quantized under rotation. Thus we focus on a tunable 1D Bose system for which the main control parameters are interaction and rotation. We will show that there is a critical boundary in the interaction-rotation control-parameter plane over which the topological properties of the system change. This is the basis of our concept of \textit{metastable quantum phase transitions} (QPTs). Moreover, we will show that the finite domain of the ring is necessary for the QPT to occur at all because the zero-point kinetic pressure can induce QPTs, i.e., the system must be finite; we thus seek to generalize the concept of QPTs to inherently finite, mesoscopic or nanoscopic systems."Comment: 29 pages, 12 figures, book will appear later this year; v2 is in improved format and includes small corrections for final versio

Topological Winding and Unwinding in Metastable Bose-Einstein Condensates

Topological winding and unwinding in a quasi-one-dimensional metastable Bose-Einstein condensate are shown to be manipulated by changing the strength of interaction or the frequency of rotation. Exact diagonalization analysis reveals that quasidegenerate states emerge spontaneously near the transition point, allowing a smooth crossover between topologically distinct states. On a mean-field level, the transition is accompanied by formation of grey solitons, or density notches, which serve as an experimental signature of this phenomenon.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Symmetry Breaking in Bose-Einstein Condensates

A gaseous Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) offers an ideal testing ground for studying symmetry breaking, because a trapped BEC system is in a mesoscopic regime, and situations exist under which symmetry breaking may or may not occur. Investigating this problem can explain why mean-field theories have been so successful in elucidating gaseous BEC systems and when many-body effects play a significant role. We substantiate these ideas in four distinct situations: namely, soliton formation in attractive BECs, vortex nucleation in rotating BECs, spontaneous magnetization in spinor BECs, and spin texture formation in dipolar BECs.Comment: Submitted to the proceedings of International Conference on Atomic Physics 200

Phase Separation of a Fast Rotating Boson-Fermion Mixture in the Lowest-Landau-Level Regime

By minimizing the coupled mean-field energy functionals, we investigate the ground-state properties of a rotating atomic boson-fermion mixture in a two-dimensional parabolic trap. At high angular frequencies in the mean-field-lowest-Landau-level regime, quantized vortices enter the bosonic condensate, and a finite number of degenerate fermions form the maximum-density-droplet state. As the boson-fermion coupling constant increases, the maximum density droplet develops into a lower-density state associated with the phase separation, revealing characteristics of a Landau-level structure

Symmetry Breaking and Enhanced Condensate Fraction in a Matter-Wave Bright Soliton

An exact diagonalization study reveals that a matter-wave bright soliton and the Goldstone mode are simultaneously created in a quasi-one-dimensional attractive Bose-Einstein condensate by superpositions of quasi-degenerate low-lying many-body states. Upon formation of the soliton the maximum eigenvalue of the single-particle density matrix increases dramatically, indicating that a fragmented condensate converts into a single condensate as a consequence of the breaking of translation symmetry.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, revised versio

Speed Limit of Efficient Cavity-Mediated Adiabatic Transfer

Cavity-mediated adiabatic transfer (CMAT) is a robust way to perform a two-qubit gate between trapped atoms inside an optical cavity. In the previous study by Goto and Ichimura [H. Goto and K. Ichimura, Phys. Rev. A 77, 013816 (2008).], the upper bound of success probability of CMAT was shown where the operation is adiabatically slow. For practical applications, however, it is crucial to operate CMAT as fast as possible without sacrificing the success probability. In this paper, we investigate the operational speed limit of CMAT conditioned on the success probability being close to the upper bound. In CMAT both the adiabatic condition and the decay of atoms and cavity modes limit the operational speed. We show which of these two conditions more severely limits the operational speed in each cavity-QED parameter region, and find that the maximal operational speed is achieved when the influence of cavity decay is dominant compared to spontaneous emission.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Ring Bose-Einstein condensate in a cavity: Chirality Detection and Rotation Sensing

Recently, a method has been proposed to detect the rotation of a ring Bose-Einstein condensate, in situ, in real-time and with minimal destruction, using a cavity driven with optical fields carrying orbital angular momentum. This method is sensitive to the magnitude of the condensate winding number but not its sign. In the present work, we consider simulations of the rotation of the angular lattice formed by the optical fields and show that the resulting cavity transmission spectra are sensitive to the sign of the condensate winding number. We demonstrate the minimally destructive technique on persistent current rotational eigenstates, counter-rotating superpositions, and a soliton singly or in collision with a second soliton. Conversely, we also investigate the sensitivity of the ring condensate, given knowledge of its winding number, to the rotation of the optical lattice. This characterizes the effectiveness of the optomechanical configuration as a laboratory rotation sensor. Our results are important to studies of rotating ring condensates used in atomtronics, superfluid hydrodynamics, simulation of topological defects and cosmological theories, interferometry using matter-wave solitons, and optomechanical sensing.Comment: 16pages, 14 Figure