Superfluid transition of a ferromagnetic Bose gas

The strongly ferromagnetic spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) has recently been realized with atomic $^{7}$Li. It was predicted that a strong ferromagnetic interaction can drive the normal gas into a magnetized phase at a temperature above the superfluid transition, and $^{7}$Li likely satisfies the criterion. We re-examine this theoretical proposal employing the two-particle-irreducible (2PI) effective potential, and conclude that there exists no stable normal magnetized phase for a dilute ferromagnetic Bose gas. For $^{7}$Li, we predict that the normal gas undergoes a joint first order transition and jump directly into a state with finite condensate density and magnetization. We estimate the size of the first order jump, and examine how a partial spin polarization in the initial sample affects the first order transition. We propose a qualitative phase diagram at fixed temperature for the trapped gas.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures. Supplemental material: 4 pages, 2 figure

Phase Diagrams for Spin-1 Bosons in an Optical Lattice

In this paper, the phase diagrams of a polar spin-1 Bose gas in a three-dimensional optical lattice with linear and quadratic Zeeman effects both at zero and finite temperatures are obtained within mean-field theory. The phase diagrams can be regrouped to two different parameter regimes depending on the magnitude of the quadratic Zeeman effect $Q$. For large $Q$, only a first-order phase transition from the nematic (NM) phase to the fully magnetic (FM) phase is found, while in the case of small $Q$, a first-order phase transition from the nematic phase to the partially magnetic (PM) phase, plus a second-order phase transition from the PM phase to the FM phase is obtained. If a net magnetization in the system exists, the first-order phase transition causes a coexistence of two phases and phase separation: for large $Q$, NM and FM phases and for small $Q$, NM and PM phases. The phase diagrams in terms of net magnetization are also obtained