Spontaneous symmetry breaking in a quenched ferromagnetic spinor Bose–Einstein condensate

By L. Sadler, J. Higbie, S. Leslie, M. Vengalattore, D. Stamper-Kurn. Nature, 2006

666 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A central goal in condensed matter and modern atomic physics is the exploration of quantum phases of matter—in particular, how the universal characteristics of zero-temperature quantum phase transitions differ from those established for thermal phase transitions at non-zero temperature. Compared to conventional condensed matter systems, atomic gases provide a unique opportunity to explore quantum dynamics far from equilibrium. For example, gaseous spinor Bose–Einstein condensates (whose atoms have non-zero internal angular momentum) are quantum fluids that simultaneously realize superfluidity and magnetism, both of which are associated with symmetry breaking. Here we explore spontaneous symmetry breaking in 87Rb spinor condensates, rapidly quenched across a quantum phase transition to a ferromagnetic state. We observe the formation of spin textures, ferromagnetic domains and domain walls, and demonstrate phase-sensitive in situ detection of spin vortices. The latter are topological defects resulting from the symmetry breaking, containing non-zero spin current but no net mass current.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/70a9db838474d05e7d86e7f1de0ece78e7bd8c84

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Citations in the corpus

One-dimensional quantum liquids: Beyond the Luttinger liquid paradigm (2011, background): “Such systems in quasi 1D configurations have already been realized with ultracold atomic gases (Higbie et al., 2005; McGuirk et al., 2002; Sadler et al., 2006).”
Engineered Open Systems and Quantum Simulations with Atoms and Ions (2012, background): “…cold atom context, focusing on thermalization (Gasenzer et al., 2005; Cramer et al., 2008; Rigol et al., 2008; Kinoshita et al., 2006; Hofferberth et al., 2007; Trotzky et al., 2011) and quench dynamics (Calabrese and Cardy, 2006; Kollath et al., 2007; Greiner et al., 2002b; Sadler et al., 2006).”
Spinor Bose gases: Symmetries, magnetism, and quantum dynamics (2013, background): “An extreme elliptical focus produces pancake-shaped gases, with the diameter being far smaller along one axis than along the others (Sadler et al., 2006).”
Spinor Bose-Einstein condensates (2010, background): “der a type of magnetic-ﬁeld quench for which the total magnetization of the system is conserved, the quench occurs along a constant-p line of the phase diagram. As in the experiment described in Ref. [100], we consider the case of p = 0 that implies that the total magnetization of the system is kept”
Time-Dependent Impurity in Ultracold Fermions: Orthogonality Catastrophe and Beyond (2012, neutral): “[4–6], hydrodynamic expansion of strongly interacting”