Quantum liquid droplets in a mixture of Bose-Einstein condensates
By C. R. Cabrera, L. Tanzi, J. Sanz, B. Naylor, P. Thomas, P. Cheiney, L. Tarruell. Science, 2017
679 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Making dilute quantum droplets In recent years, quantum fluids have been studied largely in gaseous form, such as the Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) of alkali atoms and related species. Quantum liquids, other than liquid helium, have been comparatively more difficult to come by. Cabrera et al. combined two BECs and manipulated the atomic interactions to create droplets of a quantum liquid (see the Perspective by Ferrier-Barbut and Pfau). Because the interactions were not directional, the droplets had a roughly round shape. The simplicity of this dilute system makes it amenable to theoretical modeling, enabling a better understanding of quantum fluids. Science, this issue p. 301; see also p. 274 Tuning interatomic interactions in two ultracold gases of potassium atoms creates quantum liquid droplets. Quantum droplets are small clusters of atoms self-bound by the balance of attractive and repulsive forces. Here, we report on the observation of droplets solely stabilized by contact interactions in a mixture of two Bose-Einstein condensates. We demonstrate that they are several orders of magnitude more dilute than liquid helium by directly measuring their size and density via in situ imaging. We show that the droplets are stablized against collapse by quantum fluctuations and that they require a minimum atom number to be stable. Below that number, quantum pressure drives a liquid-to-gas transition that we map out as a function of interaction strength. These ultradilute isotropic liquids remain weakly interacting and constitute an ideal platform to benchmark quantum many-body theories.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ee4edb8ac943d91619e2ea3b12e649167d7ede59
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
Citations in the corpus
- Two-dimensional vortex quantum droplets (2018, methodology): “[37,39]), we conclude that the predicted vortex modes may have radial size R up to (cid:2) 30 μ m and transverse thickness (cid:2) 1 μ m, containing 10 4 –10 5 atoms, with density ∼ 10 14 cm − 3 .”
- (INVITED) Vortex solitons: Old results and new perspectives (2019, background): “The experimentally observed shape may be nearly two-dimensional, if the condensate is strongly confined in one direction [156, 157], or isotropic, if the trapping potential is weak [158, 159].”
- Long-Lived and Transient Supersolid Behaviors in Dipolar Quantum Gases (2019, background): “We note that, while both the exact strength of the LHY term and its dependence on the gas characteristics are under debate [18,19,25,31,41], the importance of such a term, scaling with a higher power in density, is essential for stabilizing states beyond the mean-field instability [18,25,41]; see al”
- A new form of liquid matter: Quantum droplets (2020, background): “In this context, soliton-like states, which are called quantum droplets (QDs), form due to the MF attraction, which may be provided either by contact (local) inter-component attraction in binary BEC [13], [14–18], or by long-range dipole-dipole interactions (DDIs) in a single-component condensate of”