Observation of Zitterbewegung in a spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensate
By Chunlei Qu, C. Hamner, Ming Gong, Chuanwei Zhang, P. Engels. 2013
235 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Spin-orbit coupled ultra-cold atoms provide an intriguing new avenue for the study of rich spin dynamics in superfluids. In this Letter, we observe Zitterbewegung, the simultaneous velocity (thus position) and spin oscillations, of neutral atoms between two spin-orbit coupled bands in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) through sudden quantum quenches of the Hamiltonian. The observed Zitterbewegung oscillations are perfect on a short time scale but gradually damp out on a long time scale, followed by sudden and strong heating of the BEC. As an application, we also demonstrate how Zitterbewegung oscillations can be exploited to populate the upper spin-orbit band, and observe a subsequent dipole motion. Our experimental results are corroborated by a theoretical and numerical analysis and showcase the great flexibility that ultra-cold atoms provide for investigating rich spin dynamics in superfluids.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/48c7688a122a0371cb0ee49d09e85594553356a8
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
Citations in the corpus
- Artificial gauge fields in materials and engineered systems (2017, unknown): “Zitterbewegung oscillations between the two energy branches were observed following a sudden quench of the spin–orbit coupling [391,392].”
- New perspectives for Rashba spin-orbit coupling. (2015, background): “Zitterbewegung is literally the jittering or trembling motion of the carrier, which is a direct consequence of the locking between the momentum p and the (pseudo)spin momentum.”