Experimental determination of the finite-temperature phase diagram of a spin–orbit coupled Bose gas

By S. Ji, Jin-Yi Zhang, Long Zhang, Zhi-Dong Du, Wei-mou Zheng, Youjin Deng, Hui Zhai, Shuai Chen, Jian-Wei Pan. Nature Physics, 2013

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Spin–orbit (SO) coupling leads to numerous phenomena in electron systems. Artificial SO coupling in ultracold neutral atoms provides the opportunity to study such phenomena in bosonic systems, which exhibit superfluidity and various symmetry-breaking condensate phases. In general, a richer structure of symmetry breaking results in a nontrivial finite-temperature phase diagram, but the thermodynamics of the SO-coupled Bose gas at finite temperature remains unknown both in theory and experiment. Here we experimentally determine a new finite-temperature phase transition that is consistent with the transition between the stripe ordered phase and the magnetized phase. We also observe that the magnetic phase and the Bose condensate transitions occur simultaneously as temperature decreases. We determine the entire finite-temperature phase diagram of the SO-coupled Bose gas, thus illustrating the power of quantum simulation. Spin–orbit coupling in Bose gases is expected to lead to new phenomena, but the thermodynamic properties are not yet fully understood. An ultracold atom experiment using artificial spin–orbit coupling uncovers the finite-temperature phase diagram and a transition between a stripe-ordered and a magnetized phase.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9142b93766ba569d85da7e625da9e957414f0b24

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Junsaku Nitta
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Citations in the corpus

• New perspectives for Rashba spin-orbit coupling. (2015, background): “bital magnetic fields [150], changes in the dipole collective mode due to SO coupling [151], Zitterbewegung [152], and, very recently, in mapping out the finite-temperature phase diagram (see Fig. 6) [148]. Similar efforts with fermionic atoms [153] demonstrated the emergence of a SO gap in these sy”
• Artificial gauge fields in materials and engineered systems (2017, unknown): “(c) Finite-temperature phase diagram measured from the magnetization of spin–orbit-coupled Bose–Einstein condensates (from [406]).”