Topological Excitations in Spinor Bose-Einstein Condensates

We investigate the properties of skyrmion in the ferromagnetic state of spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates by means of the mean-field theory and show that the size of skyrmion is fixed to the order of the healing length. It is shown that the interaction between two skyrmions with oppositely rotating spin textures is attractive when their separation is large, following a unique power-law behavior with a power of -7/2.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

A novel method to create a vortex in a Bose-Einstein condensate

It has been shown that a vortex in a BEC with spin degrees of freedom can be created by manipulating with external magnetic fields. In the previous work, an optical plug along the vortex axis has been introduced to avoid Majorana flips, which take place when the external magnetic field vanishes along the vortex axis while it is created. In the present work, in contrast, we study the same scenario without introducing the optical plug. The magnetic field vanishes only in the center of the vortex at a certain moment of the evolution and hence we expect that the system will lose only a fraction of the atoms by Majorana flips even in the absence of an optical plug. Our conjecture is justified by numerically solving the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, where the full spinor degrees of freedom of the order parameter are properly taken into account. A significant simplification of the experimental realization of the scenario is attained by the omission of the optical plug.Comment: 8 pages, 11 figure

Spin textures in slowly rotating Bose-Einstein Condensates

Slowly rotating spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates are studied through a variational approach based upon lowest Landau level calculus. The author finds that in a gas with ferromagnetic interactions, such as $^{87}$Rb, angular momentum is predominantly carried by clusters of two different types of skyrmion textures in the spin-vector order parameter. Conversely, in a gas with antiferromagnetic interactions, such as $^{23}$Na, angular momentum is carried by $\pi$-disclinations in the nematic order parameter which arises from spin fluctuations. For experimentally relevant parameters, the cores of these $\pi$-disclinations are ferromagnetic, and can be imaged with polarized light.Comment: 14 pages, 12 low resolution bitmapped figures, RevTeX4. High resolution figures available from author. Suplementary movies available from autho

Magnetization plateaus for spin-one bosons in optical lattices: Stern-Gerlach experiments with strongly correlated atoms

We consider insulating states of spin-one bosons in optical lattices in the presence of a weak magnetic field. For the states with more than one atom per lattice site we find a series of quantum phase transitions between states with fixed magnetization and a canted nematic phase. In the presence of a global confining potential, this unusual phase diagram leads to several novel phenomena, including formation of magnetization plateaus. We discuss how these effects can be observed using spatially resolved density measurements.Comment: 4 pages 5 figure

Polarization of interacting bosons with spin

We demonstrate rigorously that in the absence of explicit spin-dependent forces one of the ground states of interacting bosons with spin is always fully polarized -- however complicated the many-body interaction potential might be. Depending on the particle spin, the polarized ground state will generally be degenerate with other states, but one can specify the exact degeneracy. For T>0 the magnetization and susceptibility necessarily exceed that of a pure paramagnet. These results are relevant to recent experiments exploring the relation between triplet superconductivity and ferromagnetism, and the Bose-Einstein condensation of atoms with spin. They eliminate the possibility, raised in some theoretical speculations, that the ground state or positive temperature state might be antiferromagnetic.Comment: v4: as published in PR

Exact Analysis of Soliton Dynamics in Spinor Bose-Einstein Condensates

We propose an integrable model of a multicomponent spinor Bose-Einstein condensate in one dimension, which allows an exact description of the dynamics of bright solitons with spin degrees of freedom. We consider specifically an atomic condensate in the F=1 hyperfine state confined by an optical dipole trap. When the mean-field interaction is attractive (c_0 < 0) and the spin-exchange interaction of a spinor condensate is ferromagnetic (c_2 < 0), we prove that the system possesses a completely integrable point leading to the existence of multiple bright solitons. By applying results from the inverse scattering method, we analyze a collision law for two-soliton solutions and find that the dynamics can be explained in terms of the spin precession.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Collective Oscillations of Vortex Lattices in Rotating Bose-Einstein Condensates

The complete low-energy collective-excitation spectrum of vortex lattices is discussed for rotating Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) by solving the Bogoliubov-de Gennes (BdG) equation, yielding, e.g., the Tkachenko mode recently observed at JILA. The totally symmetric subset of these modes includes the transverse shear, common longitudinal, and differential longitudinal modes. We also solve the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii (TDGP) equation to simulate the actual JILA experiment, obtaining the Tkachenko mode and identifying a pair of breathing modes. Combining both the BdG and TDGP approaches allows one to unambiguously identify every observed mode.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Magnetic Soliton and Soliton Collisions of Spinor Bose-Einstein Condensates in an Optical Lattice

We study the magnetic soliton dynamics of spinor Bose-Einstein condensates in an optical lattice which results in an effective Hamiltonian of anisotropic pseudospin chain. A modified Landau-Lifshitz equation is derived and exact magnetic soliton solutions are obtained analytically. Our results show that the time-oscillation of the soliton size can be controlled in practical experiment by adjusting of the light-induced dipole-dipole interaction. Moreover, the elastic collision of two solitons is investigated.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure