The phenomenon of the spontaneous phase-coherent precession of magnetization in superfluid 3He and the related effects of spin superfluidity are based on the true Bose-Einstein condensation of magnons. Several different magnon BEC states have been observed: homogeneously precessing domain (HPD); BEC condensation in the spin-orbit potential trap (Q-balls); coherent precession with fractional magnetization; and two modes of the coherent precession in squeezed aerogel. The spin superfluidity effects, like spin Josephson phenomena, spin current vortices, spin phase slippage, long distance magnetization transport by spin supercurrents have been observed.
We can pump magnons to a nearly harmonic magneto-textural trap in superfluid $^3$He-B. Using the NMR spectroscopy of levels in the trap we have measured the anisotropic magnon mass and related values of the spin-wave velocities. Based on our measurements we provide values of the Fermi-liquid parameter $F^a_1$.
The possibility of Bose-Einstein condensation of excitations has been discussed for a long time. The phenomenon of the phase-coherent precession of magnetization in superfluid 3He and the related effects of spin superfluidity are based on the true Bose-Einstein condensation of magnons. Several different states of coherent precession has been observed in 3He-B: homogeneously precessing domain (HPD); persistent signal formed by Q-balls at very low temperatures; coherent precession with fractional magnetization; and two new modes of the coherent precession in compressed aerogel. In compressed aer…
Coherent precession of trapped Bose-Einstein condensates of magnons is a sensitive probe for magnetic relaxation processes in superfluid 3He-B down to the lowest achievable temperatures. We use the dependence of the relaxation rate on the density of thermal quasiparticles to implement thermometry in 3He-B at temperatures below 300 $μ$K. Unlike popular vibrating wire or quartz tuning fork based thermometers, magnon condensates allow for contactless temperature measurement and make possible an independent in situ determination of the residual zero-temperature relaxation provided by the radiation…
We report on theoretical model and experimental results of the experiment made in a limit of absolute zero temperature ($\sim$ 600\,$μ$K) studying the spin wave analogue of black/white hole horizon using spin (magnonic) superfluidity in superfluid $^3$He-B. As an experimental tool simulating the properties of the black/white horizon we used the spin-precession waves propagating on the background of the spin super-currents between two Bose-Einstein condensates of magnons in form of homogeneously precessing domains. We provide experimental evidence of the white hole formation for spin precession…
The polar phase of $^3$He, which is topological spin-triplet superfluid with the Dirac nodal line in the spectrum of Bogolubov quasiparticles, has been recently stabilized in a nanoconfined geometry. We pump magnetic excitations (magnons) into the sample of polar phase and observe how they form a Bose-Einstein condensate, revealed by coherent precession of the magnetization of the sample. Spin superfluidity, which supports this coherence, is associated with the spontaneous breaking of U(1) symmetry by the phase of precession. We observe the corresponding Nambu-Goldstone boson and measure its m…
The new mode of magnetization precession in superfluid 3He-A in a squeezed aerogel has been recently reported. We consider this mode in terms of the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of magnons. The difference between magnon BEC states in 3He-A and in 3He-B is discussed.
The spin superfluidity -- superfluidity in the magnetic subsystem of a condensed matter - is manifested as the spontaneous phase-coherent precession of spins first discovered in 1984 in 3He-B. This superfluid current of spins - spin supercurrent - is one more representative of superfluid currents known or discussed in other systems, such as the superfluid current of mass and atoms in superfluid 4He; superfluid current of electric charge in superconductors; superfluid current of hypercharge in Standard Model of particle physics; superfluid baryonic current and current of chiral charge in quark …
Recent experiments [1],[2] which measured the spectrum of the Goldstone collective mode of coherently precessing state in 3He-B are discussed using the presentation of the coherent spin precession in terms of the Bose-Einstein condensation of magnons. The mass in the spectrum of the Goldstone boson -- phonon in the superfluid magnon liquid -- is induced by the symmetry breaking field, which is played by the RF magnetic field
Spin superfluidity, coherent spin precession, and magnon BEC are intensively investigated theoretically and experimentally nowadays. Meanwhile, clear definition and differentiation between these related phenomena is needed. It is argued that spin stiffness, which leads to existence of coherent spin precession and dissipationless spin supercurrents, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for spin superfluidity. The latter is defined as a possibility of spin transport on macroscopical distances with sufficiently large spin supercurrents. This possibility is realized at special topology of t…
20 years ago a new quantum state of matter was discovered and identified. The observed dynamic quantum state of spin precession in superfluid 3He-B bears the properties of spin current superfluidity, Bose condensation of spin waves -- magnons, off-diagonal long-range order and related phenomena of quantum coherence
We discuss the effective metric experienced by the Nambu-Goldstone mode propagating in the broken symmetry spin-superfluid state of coherent precession of magnetization. This collective mode represents the phonon in the RF driven or pulsed out-of-equilibrium Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of optical magnons. We derive the effective BEC free energy and consider the phonon spectrum when the spin superfluid BEC is formed in the anisotropic polar phase of superfluid 3He, experimentally observed in uniaxial aerogel 3He-samples. The coherent precession of magnetization experiences an instability at …
We have observed waves on the free surface of 3He-B sample at temperatures below 0.2mK. The waves are excited by vibrations of the cryostat and detected by coupling the surface to the Bose-Einstein condensate of magnon quasiparticles in the superfluid. The two lowest gravity-wave modes in our cylindrical container are identified. Damping of the waves increases with temperature linearly with the density of thermal quasiparticles, as expected. Additionally finite damping of the waves in the zero-temperature limit and enhancement of magnetic relaxation of magnon condensates by the surface waves a…
In superfluids the order parameter, which describes spontaneous symmetry breaking, is an analogue of the Higgs field in the Standard Model of particle physics. Oscillations of the field amplitude are massive Higgs bosons, while oscillations of the orientation are massless Nambu-Goldstone bosons. The 125~GeV Higgs boson, discovered at Large Hadron Collider, is light compared to electroweak energy scale, which led to a suggestion of the ``little Higgs'' extension of the Standard Model, in which the light Higgs appears as a NG mode acquiring mass due to violation of a hidden symmetry. Here we sho…
We report experimental realization of a quantum time quasicrystal, and its transformation to a quantum time crystal. We study Bose-Einstein condensation of magnons, associated with coherent spin precession, created in a flexible trap in superfluid $^3$He-B. Under a periodic drive with an oscillating magnetic field, the coherent spin precession is stabilized at a frequency smaller than that of the drive, demonstrating spontaneous breaking of discrete time translation symmetry. The induced precession frequency is incommensurate with the drive, and hence the obtained state is a time quasicrystal.…
We provide experimental details of the first experiment made in zero temperature limit ($\sim$ 600\,$μ$K) studying the magnonic black/white hole horizon analogue using absolutely pure physical system based on the spin superfluidity in superfluid $^3$He-B. We show that spin precession waves propagating on the background of the spin super-currents in a channel between two Bose-Einstein condensates of magnons in form of homogeneously precessing domains mimic the properties of the black/white horizon. Once the white hole horizon is formed and blocks the propagation of the spin-precession waves bet…
Recently it was suggested that stationary spin supercurrents (spin superfluidity) are possible in the magnon condensate observed in yttrium-iron-garnet (YIG) magnetic films under strong external pumping. Here we analyze this suggestion. From topology of the equilibrium order parameter in YIG one must not expect energetic barriers making spin supercurrents metastable. However some small barriers of dynamical origin are possible nevertheless. The critical phase gradient (analog of the Landau critical velocity in superfluids) is proportional to intensity of the coherent spin wave (number of conde…
In superfluid $^3$He-B externally pumped quantized spin-wave excitations or magnons spontaneously form a Bose-Einstein condensate in a 3-dimensional trap created with the order-parameter texture and a shallow minimum in the polarizing field. The condensation is manifested by coherent precession of the magnetization with a common frequency in a large volume. The trap shape is controlled by the profile of the applied magnetic field and by the condensate itself via the spin-orbit interaction. The trapping potential can be experimentally determined with the spectroscopy of the magnon levels in the…
The time reversal symmetric polar phase of the spin-triplet superfluid $^3$He has two types of Dirac nodal lines. In addition to the Dirac loop in the spectrum of the fermionic Bogoliubov quasiparticles in the momentum space $(p_x,p_y,p_z)$, the spectrum of bosons (magnons) has Dirac loop in the 3D space of parameters -- the components of magnetic field $(H_x,H_y,H_z)$. The bosonic Dirac system lives on the border between the type-I and type-II.
A magnon Bose-Einstein condensate in superfluid $^3$He is a fine instrument for studying the surrounding macroscopic quantum system. At zero temperature, the BEC is subject to a few, distinct forms of decay into other collective excitations, owing to momentum and energy conservation in a quantum vacuum. We study the vortex-Higgs mechanism: the vortices relax the requirement for momentum conservation, allowing the optical magnons of the BEC to transform into light Higgs quasiparticles. This observation expands the spectrum of possible interactions between magnetic quasiparticles in $^3$He-B, op…
Quantum time crystals are systems characterised by spontaneously emerging periodic order in the time domain. A range of such phases has been reported. The concept has even been discussed in popular literature, and deservedly so: while the first speculation on a phase of broken time translation symmetry did not use the name "time crystal", it was later adopted from 1980's popular culture. For the physics community, however, the ultimate qualification of a new concept is its ability to provide predictions and insight. Confirming that time crystals manifest the basic dynamics of quantum mechanics…
We show that the Landau vortex-free state in rotating container may give rise to the lattice of spin vortices. We consider this effect on example of spin vortices in magnon Bose-Einstein condensate (the phase coherent spin precession) in the B-phase of superfluid $^3$He, and on example of spin vortices in the polar phase of $^3$He.
This paper focuses on spin superfluid transport, observation of which was recently reported in antiferromagnet Cr$_2$O$_3$ [Yuan et al., Sci. Adv. 4, eaat1098 (2018)]. This paper analyzes the role of dissipation in transformation of spin current injected with incoherent magnons to a superfluid spin current near the interface where spin is injected. The Gilbert damping parameter in the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert theory does not describe dissipation properly, and the dissipation parameters are calculated from the Boltzmann equation for magnons scattered by defects. The two-fluid theory is developed…
From topology of the order parameter of the magnon condensate observed in yttrium-iron-garnet (YIG) magnetic films one must not expect energetic barriers making spin supercurrents metastable. But we show that some barriers of dynamical origin are possible nevertheless until the gradient of the phase (angle of spin precession) does not exceed the critical value (analog of the Landau critical velocity in superfluids). On the other hand, recently published claims of experimental detection of spin superfluidity in YIG films and antiferromagnets are not justified, and spin superfluidity in magnetic…
The Josephson relation for the superfluid density is derived for a Fermi superfluid in the BCS-BEC crossover. This identity extends the original Josephson relation for Bose superfluids. It gives a simple exact relation between the superfluid density $ρ_s$ and the broken-symmetry Cooper pair order parameter $Δ_0$ in terms of the infrared limit of the pair fluctuation propagator. The same expression holds through the entire BCS-BEC crossover, describing the superfluid density of a weak-coupling BCS superfluid as well as the superfluid density of a Bose condensate of dimer molecules.
We investigate the stability of the recently discovered room temperature Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of magnons in Ytrrium Iron Garnet (YIG) films. We show that magnon-magnon interactions depend strongly on the external field orientation, and that the BEC in current experiments is actually metastable - it only survives because of finite size effects, and because the BEC density is very low. On the other hand a strong field applied perpendicular to the sample plane leads to a repulsive magnon-magnon interaction; we predict that a high-density magnon BEC can then be formed in this perpendicul…
Critical velocities have been observed in an ultracold superfluid Fermi gas throughout the BEC-BCS crossover. A pronounced peak of the critical velocity at unitarity demonstrates that superfluidity is most robust for resonant atomic interactions. Critical velocities were determined from the abrupt onset of dissipation when the velocity of a moving one dimensional optical lattice was varied. The dependence of the critical velocity on lattice depth and on the inhomogeneous density profile was studied.
We consider cigar shaped Fermi superfluid in the BEC-BCS crossover. Using polytropic form of equation of state, we derive low energy multibranch bosonic excitations and the corresponding density fluctuations in three different regimes along the crossover, namely weak-coupling BCS, unitarity and molecular BEC regimes. Bragg spectroscopy can be used to probe the multibranch nature of the low energy bosonic excitations by measuring dynamic structure factor. Therefore, we calculate dynamic structure factor in those three different regimes. In the Bragg spectroscopy, an actual observable is momentu…
We present a new study of nonlinear NMR and Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC) of nuclear spin waves in antiferromagnetic MnCO3 with coupled electron and nuclear spins. In particular, we show that the observed behaviour of NMR signals strongly contradicts the conventional description of paramagnetic ensembles of noninteracting spins based on the phenomenological Bloch equations. We present a new theoretical description of the coupled electron-nuclear spin precession, which takes into account an indirect relaxation of nuclear spins via the electron subsystem. We show that the magnitude of the nuc…
We propose a phenomenological equation for the vortex line density in rotating Bose-Einstein condensates as a function of the angular speed. This equation provides a simple description of the gross features of the increase in vortex number from the appearance of the first vortex to the theoretical rigid-body result for high vortex density, and allows one to compare with analogous situations in superfluid helium, after the suitable changes in the relevant parameters are made.
The comment explains that the preprint arXiv:1503.0042 has not presented persuasive theoretical or experimental arguments of existence of spin supercurrents in a magnon condensate prepared in a room temperature yttrium-iron-garnet magnetic film because the authors did not check known criteria for existence of spin supercurrents in magnetically ordered materials. Also they did not compare their supercurrent interpretation with a competing and more realistic scenario of transport by spin diffusion.
The present review analyzes and compares various types of dissipationless spin transport: (1) Superfluid transport, when the spin-current state is a metastable state (a local but not the absolute minimum in the parameter space). (2) Ballistic spin transport, when spin is transported without losses simply because sources of dissipation are very weak. (3) Equilibrium spin currents, i.e., genuine persistent currents. (4) Spin currents in the spin Hall effect. Since superfluidity is frequently connected with Bose condensation, recent debates about magnon Bose condensation are also reviewed. For an…
In relativistic quantum field theories, compact objects of interacting bosons can become stable owing to conservation of an additive quantum number $Q$. Discovering such $Q$-balls propagating in the Universe would confirm supersymmetric extensions of the standard model and may shed light on the mysteries of dark matter, but no unambiguous experimental evidence exists. We report observation of a propagating long-lived $Q$-ball in superfluid $^3$He, where the role of $Q$-ball is played by a Bose-Einstein condensate of magnon quasiparticles. We achieve accurate representation of the $Q$-ball Hami…
Strong experimental evidences of the formation of quasi-equilibrium Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of magnons at room temperature in a film of yttrium iron garnet (YIG) excited by microwave radiation have been recently reported. Here we present a theory for the magnon gas driven by a microwave field far out of equilibrium showing that the nonlinear magnetic interactions create cooperative mechanisms for the onset of a phase transition leading to the spontaneous generation of quantum coherence and magnetic dynamic order in a macroscopic scale. The theory provides rigorous support for the form…
We study the magnetic phase diagram and hysteresis behavior of weakly coupled spin dimers on a triangular lattice using the cluster mean-field method with cluster-size scaling. We find that the magnetization curve has plateaus at 1/3 and 2/3 of the total magnetization, in which local singlet and triplet states form a superlattice pattern. Moreover, if increasing (decreasing) the magnetic field from the 1/3 (2/3) plateau, the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of triplons occurs on the superlattice background, leading to the transition into magnon supersolid phase. We also find that the first-ord…
We explore the zero temperature phase behavior of a two-dimensional two-component atomic Fermi gas with population and mass imbalance in the regime of the BEC-BCS crossover. Working in the mean-field approximation, we show that the normal and homogeneous balanced superfluid phases are separated by an inhomogeneous superfluid phase of Fulde-Ferrel-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) type. We obtain an analytical expression for the line of continuous transitions separating the normal and inhomogeneous FFLO phases. We further show that the transition from the FFLO phase to the homogeneous balanced superflu…
Spinful superfluids of ultracold atoms are ideal for investigating the intrinsic properties of spin current and texture because they are realized in an isolated, nondissipative system free from impurities, dislocations, and thermal fluctuations. This study theoretically reveals the impact of spin current on a magnetic domain wall in spinful superfluids. An exact wall solution is obtained in the ferromagnetic phase of a spin-1 Bose--Einstein condensate with easy-axis anisotropy at zero temperature. The bosonic-quasiparticle mechanics analytically show that the spin current along the wall become…
We show that two new intra-species P-wave superfluid phases appear in two-component asymmetric Fermi systems with short-range S-wave interactions. In the BEC limit, phonons of the molecular BEC induce P-wave superfluidity in the excess fermions. In the BCS limit, density fluctuations induce P-wave superfluidity in both the majority and the minority species. These phases may be realized in experiments with spin-polarized Fermi gases.
