Spontaneous vortices in the formation of Bose–Einstein condensates

By C. Weiler, T. Neely, D. R. Scherer, Ashton S. Bradley, Matthew J. Davis, B. Anderson. Nature, 2008

448 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Phase transitions are ubiquitous in nature, and can be arranged into universality classes such that systems having unrelated microscopic physics show identical scaling behaviour near the critical point. One prominent universal element of many continuous phase transitions is the spontaneous formation of topological defects during a quench through the critical point. The microscopic dynamics of defect formation in such transitions are generally difficult to investigate, particularly for superfluids. However, Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs) offer unique experimental and theoretical opportunities for probing these details. Here we present an experimental and theoretical study of the BEC phase transition of a trapped atomic gas, in which we observe and statistically characterize the spontaneous formation of vortices during condensation. Using microscopic theories that incorporate atomic interactions and quantum and thermal fluctuations of a finite-temperature Bose gas, we simulate condensation and observe vortex formation in close quantitative agreement with our experimental results. Our studies provide further understanding of the development of coherence in superfluids, and may allow for direct investigation of universal phase transition dynamics.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4c5e9c761ee8671bde63401636af4d15de6deb6d

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Citations in the corpus

Colloquium: Nonequilibrium dynamics of closed interacting quantum systems (2010, background): “In particular, the issue of non-adiabatic dynamics near quantum phase transitions has been the focus of recent experimental studies on condensate formation in a dilute, weakly interacting Bose gas that is rapidly cooled past the BEC phase transition (Weiler et al., 2008).”
Classical and Quantum Shortcuts to Adiabaticity for Scale-Invariant Driving (2014, methodology): “Nonetheless, phase fluctuations in the newborn condensate are expected to result in the formation of solitons [70] or vortices [71], depending in the dimensionality, as dictated by the Kibble-Zurek mechanism [72, 73].”
Scaling Behavior and Beyond Equilibrium in the Hexagonal Manganites (2012, background): “Bose-Einstein condensates could in principle provide a suitable system but are so far subject to experimental limitations [14].”
Dynamics and statistical mechanics of ultra-cold Bose gases using c-field techniques (2008, methodology): “ortices in 200-m-square expansion images of BECs created in the toroidal trap. e, f, Simulations of BEC growth in the toroidal trap show vortices (as in b,c) and persistent currents. Reproduced from [212] implementation arising from the nonlocality of the deterministic part and the multiplicative na”
Spontaneous creation of Kibble–Zurek solitons in a Bose–Einstein condensate (2013, methodology): “Quantized vortices produced in a pancake-shaped condensate by a fast quench across the transition temperature have been already observed [24], but their limited statistics prevented the test of the KZM scaling.”