Nonthermal fixed points of far-from-equilibrium dynamics of a dilute degenerate Bose gas are analysed in two and three spatial dimensions. For such systems, universal power-law distributions, previously found within a nonperturbative quantum-field theoretic approach, are shown to be related to vortical dynamics and superfluid turbulence. The results imply an interpretation of the momentum scaling at the nonthermal fixed points in terms of independent vortex excitations of the superfluid. Long-wavelength acoustic excitations on the top of these are found to follow a non-thermal power law. The results shed light on fundamental aspects of superfluid turbulence and have strong potential implications for related phenomena studied, e.g., in early-universe inflation or quark-gluon plasma dynamics.
Nonthermal fixed points of the dynamics of a dilute degenerate Bose gas far from thermal equilibrium are analyzed in two and three spatial dimensions. Universal power-law distributions, previously found within a nonperturbative quantum-field theoretical approach and recently shown to be related to vortical dynamics and superfluid turbulence [Phys. Rev. B 84, 020506(R) (2011)], are studied in detail. The results imply an interpretation of the scaling behavior in terms of independent vortex excitations of the superfluid and show that the statistics of topological excitations can be described in …
We investigate the competition of various exotic superfluid states in a chain of spin-polarized ultracold fermionic atoms with hyperfine spin $F = 3/2$ and s-wave contact interactions. We show that the ground state is an exotic inhomogeneous mixture in which two distinct superfluid phases --- spin-carrying pairs and singlet quartets --- form alternating domains in an extended region of the parameter space.
We propose a method to measure the superfluid fraction of an atomic gas. The method involves the use of a vector potential generated by optical beams with non-zero angular momentum to simulate uniform rotation. The induced change in angular momentum of the atomic gas can be measured spectroscopically. This allows a direct determination of the superfluid fraction.
A rotating ultracold S-wave superfluid Fermi gas is considered, when the population imbalance (or equivalently the mismatch in chemical potentials) corresponds to the Larkin-Ovchinnikov-Fulde-Ferrell (LOFF) state in the vicinity of the Lifshitz critical point. It is shown that under these conditions the critical angular velocity in two-dimensional systems is an oscillating function of temperature and population imbalance giving rise to reentrant superfluid phases. This leads to vortex lattices with multiple-quantized circulation quanta. The reason for this behavior is the population by Cooper …
We study a system of periodic Bose condensed atoms coupled to cavity photons using the input-output formalism. We show that the cavity will either act as a through pass Lorentzian filter when the superfluid fraction of the condensate is minimum or completely reflect the input field when the superfluid fraction is maximum. We show that by monitoring the ratio between the transmitted field and the reflected field, one can estimate the superfluid fraction.
We propose an experimental implementation of a topological superfluid with ultracold fermionic atoms. An optical superlattice is used to juxtapose a 1D gas of fermionic atoms and a 2D conventional superfluid of condensed Feshbach molecules. The latter acts as a Cooper pair reservoir and effectively induces a superfluid gap in the 1D system. Combined with a spin-dependent optical lattice along the 1D tube and laser-induced atom tunneling, we obtain a topological superfluid phase. In the regime of weak couplings to the molecular fl eld and for a uniform gas the atomic system is equivalent to Kit…
We reveal that the p-wave superfluid can be realized in a mixture of fermionic and F=1 bosonic gases. We derive a general set of the gap equations for gaps in the s- and p-channels. It is found that the spin-spin bose-fermi interactions favor the p-wave pairing and naturally suppress the pairing in the s-channel. The gap equations for the polar phase of p-wave superfluid fermions are numerically solved. It is shown that a pure p-wave superfluid can be observed in a well-controlled environment of atomic physics.
We propose an experiment to directly probe the non-Abelian statistics of Majorana fermions by braiding them in an s-wave superfluid of ultracold atoms. We show different orders of braiding operations give orthogonal output states that can be distinguished through Raman spectroscopy. Realization of Majorana bound states in an s-wave superfluid requires strong spin-orbital coupling and a controllable Zeeman field in the perpendicular direction. We present a simple laser configuration to generate the artificial spin-orbital coupling and the required Zeeman field in the dark state subspace.
We propose a one-dimensional Hamiltonian $H_{1D}$ which supports Majorana fermions when $d_{x^{2}-y^{2}}$-wave superfluid appears in the ultracold atomic system and obtain the phase-separation diagrams both for the time-reversal-invariant case and time-reversal-symmetry-breaking case. From the phase-separation diagrams, we find that the single Majorana fermions exist in the topological superfluid region, and we can reach this region by tuning the chemical potential $μ$ and spin-orbit coupling $α_{R}$. Importantly, the spin-orbit coupling has realized in ultracold atoms by the recent experiment…
We present an $\textit{ab initio}$, numerically exact study of attractive fermions in square lattices with Rashba spin-orbit coupling. The ground state of this system is a supersolid, with co-existing charge and superfluid order. The superfluid is composed of both singlet and triplet pairs induced by spin-orbit coupling. We perform large-scale calculations using auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo to provide the first full, quantitative description of the charge, spin, and pairing properties of the system. In addition to characterizing the exotic physics, our results will serve as essential hi…
We investigate the zero-temperature excitation spectrum of two-dimensional soft-core bosons for a wide range parameters and across the phase transition from a superfluid to a supersolid state. Based on mean field calculations and recent Quantum Monte Carlo results, we demonstrate the applicability of the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations, even at high interaction strengths where the system forms an insulating cluster crystal. Interestingly, our study reveals that the maximum energy of the longitudinal phonon band in the supersolid phase connects to the maxon energy of the superfluid at the phase …
We theoretically investigate the inhomogeneous Fulde-Ferrell (FF) superfluidity in a three dimensional atomic Fermi gas with Rashba spin-orbit coupling near a broad Feshbach resonance. We show that within mean-field theory the FF superfluid state is always more favorable than the standard Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid state when an in-plane Zeeman field is applied. We present a qualitative finite-temperature phase diagram near resonance and argue that the predicted FF superfluid is observable with experimentally attainable temperatures (i.e., $T\sim0.2T_{F}$, where $T_{F}$ is the …
We show that in s-wave superfluids of cold fermionic atoms with laser-field-generated effective spin-orbit interactions, a topological phase with gapless edge states and Majorana fermion quasiparticles obeying the non-Abelian statistics is realized in the case with a large Zeeman magnetic field. Our scenario provides a promising approach for quantum computation manipulating non-Abelian anyons via an s-wave Feshbach resonance.
Ultracold atomic gases are a powerful tool to experimentally study strongly correlated quantum many-body systems. In particular, ultracold Fermi gases with tunable interactions have allowed to realize the famous BEC-BCS crossover from a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of molecules to a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid of weakly bound Cooper pairs. However, large parts of the excitation spectrum of fermionic superfluids in the BEC-BCS crossover are still unexplored. In this work, we use Bragg spectroscopy to measure the full momentum-resolved low-energy excitation spectrum of strongly …
We propose a pump probe experiment for detecting the d-wave superfluid and d-density wave phases of ultracold Fermions on an optical lattice. The pump consists of periodic modulations of the optical lattice intensity which creates quasiparticle pairs in these systems. The changes in the momentum distribution under the drive can be used to measure quasiparticle dispersion and gap anisotropy. Further, we show that the pattern of peaks and dips in the spin selective density-density correlation function provides a phase sensitive probe of the symmetry of the order parameter in these systems.
We perform detailed analytical and numerical studies of a recently proposed method for a spectroscopic measurement of the superfluid fraction of an ultracold atomic gas [N. R. Cooper and Z. Hadzibabic, Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 030401 (2010)]. Previous theoretical work is extended by explicitly including the effects of non-zero temperature and interactions, and assessing the quantitative accuracy of the proposed measurement for a one-component Bose gas. We show that for suitably chosen experimental parameters the method yields an experimentally detectable signal and a sufficiently accurate measure…
The role of impurities as experimental probes in the detection of quantum material properties is well appreciated. Here we study the effect of a single classical magnetic impurity in trapped ultracold Fermi superfluids. Depending on its shape and strength, a magnetic impurity can induce single or multiple mid-gap bound states in a superfluid Fermi gas. The multiple mid-gap states could coincide with the development of a Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) phase within the superfluid. As an analog of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope, we propose a modified RF spectroscopic method to measure…
We study the superfluid state of atomic Fermi gases using a BCS-BEC crossover theory. Our approach emphasizes non-condensed fermion pairs which strongly hybridize with their (Feshbach-induced) molecular boson counterparts. These pairs lead to pseudogap effects above $T_c$ and non-BCS characteristics below. We discuss how these effects influence the experimental signatures of superfluidity.
Ultracold atomic Fermi gases can be tuned to interact strongly, where they display spectroscopic signatures above the superfluid transition reminiscent of the pseudogap in cuprates. However, the extent of the analogy can be questioned, since thermodynamic quantities in the low temperature spin-imbalanced normal state can be described successfully using Fermi liquid theory. Here we present spin susceptibility measurements across the interaction strength-temperature phase diagram using a novel radiofrequency technique with ultracold $^6\textrm{Li}$ gases. For all significant interaction strength…
Liquid helium 4 had been the only bosonic superfluid available in experiments for a long time. This situation was changed in 1995, when a new superfluid was born with the realization of the Bose-Einstein condensation in ultracold atomic gases. The liquid helium 4 is strongly interacting and has no spin; there is almost no way to change its parameters, such as interaction strength and density. The new superfluid, Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), offers various aspects of advantages over liquid helium. On the one hand, BEC is weakly interacting and has spin degrees of freedom. On the other hand, …
Motivated by recent experimental advances in ultracold atomic gases placed in cavities, we study the influence of the atom-cavity coupling on the Fermi gases trapped in optical lattices. By adiabatic elimination of the cavity photon field, the atom-cavity coupling gives rise to effective long-range interactions. It results in a variety of two-body scattering processes, during which the atomic pairs can acquire an additional center-of-mass momentum. This reveals the possibility of Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) superfluids in which the atomic pairing momentum is nonzero. By inspecting …
We study the superfluidity of a pure spin current that is a spin current without mass current. We examine two types of pure spin currents, planar and circular, in spin-1 Bose gas. For the planar current, it is usually unstable, but can be stabilized by the quadratic Zeeman effect. The circular current can be generated with spin-orbit coupling. When the spin-orbit coupling strength is weak, we find that the circular pure spin current is the ground state of the system and thus a super-flow. We discuss the experimental schemes to realize and detect a pure spin current.
We study a 1D Fermi gas with attractive short range-interactions in a disordered potential by the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) technique. This setting can be implemented experimentally by using cold atom techniques. We identify a region of parameters for which disorder enhances the superfluid state. As disorder is further increased, global superfluidity eventually breaks down. However this transition occurs before the transition to the insulator state takes place. This suggests the existence of an intermediate metallic `pseudogap' phase characterized by strong pairing but no qua…
We develop a strong-coupling ($t \ll U$) expansion technique for calculating the density profile for bosonic atoms trapped in an optical lattice with an overall harmonic trap at finite temperature and finite on site interaction in the presence of superfluid regions. Our results match well with quantum Monte Carlo simulations at finite temperature. We also show that the superfluid order parameter never vanishes in the trap due to proximity effect. Our calculations for the scaled density in the vacuum to superfluid transition agree well with the experimental data for appropriate temperatures. We…
We present our experimental setup to produce ultracold strongly correlated fermionic superfluids made of a two-component spin-mixture of $^6$Li atoms. Employing standard cooling techniques, we achieve quantum degeneracy in a single-beam optical dipole trap. Our setup is capable of generating spin-balanced samples at temperatures as low as $T/T_F = 0.1$ containing up to $5 \times 10^4$ atomic pairs. We can access different superfluid regimes by tuning the interparticle interactions close to a broad magnetic Feshbach resonance. In particular, we are able to explore the crossover from the molecul…
We show that single-component fermionic polar molecules confined to a 2D geometry and dressed by a microwave field, may acquire an attractive $1/r^3$ dipole-dipole interaction leading to superfluid p-wave pairing at sufficiently low temperatures even in the BCS regime. The emerging state is the topological $p_x+ip_y$ phase promising for topologically protected quantum information processing. The main decay channel is via collisional transitions to dressed states with lower energies and is rather slow, setting a lifetime of the order of seconds at 2D densities $\sim 10^8$ cm$^{-2}$.
We discuss the finite-temperature phase diagram in the three-dimensional Bose-Hubbard (BH) model in the strong correlation regime, relevant for Bose-Einstein condensates in optical lattices, by employing a quantum rotor approach. In systems with strong on site repulsive interactions, the rotor U(1) phase variable dual to the local boson density emerges as an important collective field. After establishing the connection between the rotor construction and the the on--site interaction in the BH model the robust effective action formalism is developed which allows us to study the superfluid phase …
We show that the dynamics of cold bosonic atoms in a two-dimensional square optical lattice produced by a bichromatic light-shift potential is described by a Bose-Hubbard model with an additional effective staggered magnetic field. In addition to the known uniform superfluid and Mott insulating phases, the zero-temperature phase diagram exhibits a novel kind of finite-momentum superfluid phase, characterized by a quantized staggered rotational flux. An extension for fermionic atoms leads to an anisotropic Dirac spectrum, which is relevant to graphene and high-$T_c$ superconductors.
We discuss the thermodynamic signatures for the topological phase transitions into Majorana and Weyl superfluid phases in ultracold Fermi gases in two and three dimensions in the presence of Rashba spin-orbit coupling and a Zeeman field. We analyze the thermodynamic properties exhibiting the distinct nature of the topological phase transitions linked with the Majorana fermions (2D Fermi gas) and Weyl fermions (3D Fermi gas) which can be observed experimentally, including pressure, chemical potential, isothermal compressibility, entropy, and specific heat, as a function of the interaction and t…
Achieving a higher superfluid transition $T_c$ has been a goal for the fields of superconductivity and atomic Fermi gases. Here we propose that, by using mixed dimensionality, one may achieve ultra high temperature superfluids in two component atomic Fermi gases, where one component feels a regular three-dimensional (3D) continuum space, while the other is subject to a 1D optic lattice potential. Via tuning the lattice spacing and trap depth, one can effectively raise the Fermi level dramatically upon pairing so that superfluidity may occur at an ultra high temperature (in units of Fermi energ…
We study a new type of Fermi polaron induced by an impurity interacting with an ultracold Fermi superfluid. Due to the three-component nature of the system, the polaron can become trimer-like with a non-universal energy spectrum. We identify multiple avoided crossings between impurity- and trimer-like solutions in both the attractive and the repulsive polaron spectra. In particular, the widths of avoided crossings gradually increase as the Fermi superfluid undergoes a crossover from the BCS side towards the BEC side, which suggests instabilities towards three-body losses. Such losses can be re…
We investigate the superfluid phase transition and effects of mass imbalance in the BCS (Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer)-BEC (Bose-Einstein condensation) crossover regime of an cold Fermi gas. We point out that the Gaussian fluctuation theory developed by Nozières and Schmitt-Rink and the $T$-matrix theory, that are now widely used to study strong-coupling physics of cold Fermi gases, give unphysical results in the presence of mass imbalance. To overcome this problem, we extend the $T$-matrix theory to include higher-order pairing fluctuations. Using this, we examine how the mass imbalance affects …
We study the Mott phases and the superfluid-insulator transition of two-component ultracold bosons on a square optical lattice in the presence of a non-Abelian synthetic gauge field, which renders a SU(2) hopping matrix for the bosons. Using a resummed hopping expansion, we calculate the excitation spectra in the Mott insulating phases and demonstrate that the superfluid-insulator phase boundary displays a non-monotonic dependence on the gauge field strength. We also compute the momentum distribution of the bosons in the presence of the non-Abelian field and show that they develop peaks at non…
We consider a localized impurity atom that interacts with a cloud of fermions in the paired state. We develop an effective scattering length description of the interaction between an impurity and a fermionic atom using their vacuum scattering length. Treating the pairing of fermions at the mean-field level, we show that the impurity atom acts like a magnetic impurity in the condensed matter context, and leads to the formation of a pair of Shiba bound states inside the superconducting gap. In addition, the impurity atom can lead to the formation of deeply bound states below the Fermi sea.
We discuss the collective modes in an alkaline-earth Fermi gas close to an orbital Feshbach resonance. Unlike the usual Feshbach resonance, the orbital Feshbach resonance in alkaline-earth atoms realizes a two-band superfluid system where the fermionic nature of both the open and the closed channel has to be taken into account. We show that apart from the usual Anderson-Bogoliubov mode which corresponds to the oscillation of total density, there also appears the long-sought Leggett mode corresponding to the oscillation of relative density between the two channels. The existence of the phonon a…
The Fulde-Ferrell (FF) superfluid phase, in which fermions form finite-momentum Cooper pairings, is well studied in spin-singlet superfluids in past decades. Different from previous works that engineer the FF state in spinful cold atoms, we show that the FF state can emerge in spinless Fermi gases confined in optical lattice associated with nearest-neighbor interactions. The mechanism of the spinless FF state relies on the split Fermi surfaces by tuning the chemistry potential, which naturally gives rise to finite-momentum Cooper pairings. The phase transition is accompanied by changed Chern n…
Understanding how strongly correlated two-dimensional (2D) systems can give rise to unconventional superconductivity with high critical temperatures is one of the major unsolved problems in condensed matter physics. Ultracold 2D Fermi gases have emerged as clean and controllable model systems to study the interplay of strong correlations and reduced dimensionality, but direct evidence of superfluidity in these systems has been missing. Here, we demonstrate superfluidity in an ultracold 2D Fermi gas by moving a periodic potential through the system and observing no dissipation below a critical …
We investigate superfluid properties of a one-component Fermi gas with a uniaxially anisotropic $p$-wave pairing interaction, $U_x>U_y=U_z$ (where $U_i$ ($i=x,y,z)$ is a $p_i$-wave pairing interaction). This type of interaction is considered to be realized in a $^{40}$K Fermi gas. Including pairing fluctuations within a strong-coupling $T$-matrix theory, we determine the $p_x$-wave superfluid phase transition temperature $T^{p_x}_{\rm c}$, as well as the other phase transition temperature $T_{\rm c}^{p_x+ip_y}$ ($<T_{\rm c}^{p_x}$), below which the superfluid order parameter has the $p_x+ip_y$…
We explore the far-from-equilibrium dynamics of Bose gases in a universal regime associated to nonthermal fixed points. While previous investigations concentrated on scaling functions and exponents describing equal-time correlations, we compute the additional scaling functions and dynamic exponent $z$ characterizing the frequency dependence or dispersion from unequal-time correlations. This allows us to compare the characteristic condensation and correlation times from a finite-size scaling analysis depending on the system's volume.
Zero-point energy of a trapped ultracold Fermi gas at unitarity: squeezing the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and suppressing the Pauli principle to produce a superfluid state
We show that pairing in an ultracold Fermi gas under spin-orbital-angular-momentum coupling (SOAMC) can acquire topological characters encoded in the quantized angular degrees of freedom. The resulting topological superfluid is the angular analog of its counterpart in a one-dimensional Fermi gas with spin-orbit coupling, but characterized by a Zak phase defined in the angular-momentum space. Upon tuning the SOAMC parameters, a topological phase transition occurs, which is accompanied by the closing of the quasiparticle excitation gap. Remarkably, a topological vortex state can also be stabiliz…
We investigate long-range pairing interactions between ultracold fermionic atoms confined in an optical lattice which are mediated by the coupling to a cavity. In the absence of other perturbations, we find three degenerate pairing symmetries for a two-dimensional square lattice. By tuning a weak local atomic interaction via a Feshbach resonance or by tuning a weak magnetic field, the superfluid system can be driven from a topologically trivial s-wave to topologically ordered, chiral superfluids containing Majorana edge states. Our work points out a novel path towards the creation of exotic su…
We theoretically study a possible new pairing mechanism for a two-dimensional population imbalanced Fermi gas with short-range repulsive interactions which can be realized on the upper branch of a Feshbach resonance. We use a well-controlled renormalization group approach, which allows an unbiased study of the instabilities of imbalanced Fermi liquid without assumption of a broken symmetry and gives a numerical calculation of the transition temperature from microscopic parameters. Our results show a leading superfluid instability in the p-wave channel for the majority species. The correspondin…
We show that a time-dependent magnetic field inducing a periodically modulated scattering length may lead to interesting novel scenarios for cold gases in optical lattices, characterized by a nonlinear hopping depending on the number difference at neighboring sites. We discuss the rich physics introduced by this hopping, including pair superfluidity, exactly defect-free Mott-insulator states for finite hopping, and pure holon and doublon superfluids. We also address experimental detection, showing that the introduced nonlinear hopping may lead in harmonically trapped gases to abrupt drops in t…
Quantum phase slips are the primary excitations in one-dimensional superfluids and superconductors at low temperatures. They have been well characterized in most condensed-matter systems, and signatures of their existence has been recently observed in superfluids based on quantum gases too. In this review we briefly summarize the main results obtained on the investigation of phase slips from superconductors to quantum gases. In particular we focus our attention on recent experimental results of the dissipation in one-dimensional Bose superfluids flowing along a shallow periodic potential, whic…
We present a direct measurement of the density profile of a two-dimensional Mott Insulator formed by ultracold atoms in an optical lattice. High resolution absorption imaging is used to probe the "wedding-cake" structure of a trapped gas as it crosses the boundary from a unit-filled Mott insulating phase to the superfluid phase at finite temperature. Detailed analysis of images yields measurements of temperature and local compressibility; for the latter we observe a strong suppression deep in the Mott-insulating phase, which is recovered for the superfluid and normal phases. Furthermore, we me…
A possibility of the condensation of excitations with non-zero momentum in moving superfluid media is considered in terms of the Ginzburg-Landau model. The results might be applicable to the superfluid $^4$He, ultracold atomic Bose gases, various superconducting and neutral systems with pairing, like ultracold atomic Fermi gases and the neutron component in compact stars. The order parameters, the energy gain, and critical velocities are found.
We study the non-equilibrium dynamics of ultracold bosons in an optical lattice with a time dependent hopping amplitude J(t)=J_0 +δJ \cos(ωt) which takes the system from a superfluid phase near the Mott-superfluid transition (J= J_0+δJ) to a Mott phase (J=J_0-δJ) and back through a quantum critical point (J=J_c) and demonstrate dynamic freezing of the boson wavefunction at specific values of ω. At these values, the wavefunction overlap F (defect density P=1-F) approaches unity (zero). We provide a qualitative explanation of the freezing phenomenon, show it's robustness against quantum fluctuat…
We find a new physical regime in the trapped Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian using time-evolving block decimation. Between Mott-insulating and superfluid phases, the latter induced by trap compression, a spatially self-organized state appears in which non-local entropy signals entanglement between spatially distant superfluid shells. We suggest a linear rather than harmonic potential as an ideal way to observe such a self-organized system. We also explore both quantum information and thermal entropies in the superfluid regime, finding that while the former follows the density closely the latter can b…
We investigate the system of a heavy impurity embedded in a paired two-component Fermi gas at the crossover from a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) to a Bardeen--Cooper--Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid via an extension of the functional determinant approach (FDA). FDA is an exact numerical approach applied to study manifestations of Anderson\textquoteright s orthogonality catastrophe (OC) in the system of a static impurity immersed in an ideal Fermi gas. Here, we extend the FDA to a strongly correlated superfluid background described by a BCS mean-field wavefunction. In contrast to the ideal Fermi g…
We have studied the distinctive features of the Fulde-Ferrel-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) instability and phase transitions in two--dimensional (2D) mesoscopic superconductors placed in magnetic field of arbitrary orientation and rotating superfluid Fermi gases with imbalanced state populations. Using a generalized version of the phenomenological Ginzburg-Landau theory we have shown that the FFLO states are strongly modified by the effect of the trapping potential confining the condensate. The phenomenon of the inhomogeneous state formation is determined by the interplay of three length scales: (…
We investigate universal behavior of isolated many-body systems far from equilibrium, which is relevant for a wide range of applications from ultracold quantum gases to high-energy particle physics. The universality is based on the existence of nonthermal fixed points, which represent nonequilibrium attractor solutions with self-similar scaling behavior. The corresponding dynamic universality classes turn out to be remarkably large, encompassing both relativistic as well as nonrelativistic quantum and classical systems. For the examples of nonrelativistic (Gross-Pitaevskii) and relativistic sc…
We study how temperature affects the lifetime of a quantized, persistent current state in a toroidal Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). When the temperature is increased, we find a decrease in the persistent current lifetime. Comparing our measured decay rates to simple models of thermal activation and quantum tunneling, we do not find agreement. We also measured the size of hysteresis loops size in our superfluid ring as a function of temperature, enabling us to extract the critical velocity. The measured critical velocity is found to depend strongly on temperature, approaching the zero temperat…
In this letter we develop a theory for the first and second sound in a two-dimensional atomic superfluid across the superfluid transition based on the dynamic Koterlitz-Thouless theory. We employ a set of modified two-fluid hydrodynamic equations which incorporate the dynamics of the quantised vortices, rather than the conventional ones for a three-dimensional superfluid. As far as the sound dispersion equation is concerned, the modification is essentially equivalent to replacing the static superfluid density with a frequency dependent one, renormalised by the frequency dependent "dielectric c…
The collective modes of a quantum liquid shape and impact its properties profoundly, including its emergent phenomena such as superfluidity. Here we present how a two-dimensional Bose gas responds to a moving lattice potential. In particular we discuss how the induced heating rate depends on the interaction strength and the temperature. This study is motivated by the recent measurements of Sobirey {\it et al.} arXiv:2005.07607 (2020), for which we provide a quantitative understanding. Going beyond the existing measurements, we demonstrate that this probing method allows to identify first and s…
We investigate single-particle excitations and strong-coupling effects in a two-dimensional Fermi gas. Including pairing fluctuations within a Gaussian fluctuation theory, we calculate the density of states $ρ(ω)$ near the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transition temperature $T_{\rm BKT}$. Near $T_{\rm BKT}$, we show that superfluid fluctuations induce a pseudogap in $ρ(ω)$. The pseudogap structure is very similar to the BCS superfluid density of states, although the superfluid order parameter is absent in the present two-dimensional case. Since a two-dimensional $^{40}$K Fermi gas has…
Recent experiments have shown a remarkable number of collapse-and-revival oscillations of the matter-wave coherence of ultracold atoms in optical lattices [Will et al., Nature 465, 197 (2010)]. Using a mean-field approximation to the Bose-Hubbard model, we show that the visibility of collapse-and-revival interference patterns reveal number squeezing of the initial superfluid state. To describe the dynamics, we use an effective Hamiltonian that incorporates the intrinsic two-body and induced three-body interactions, and we analyze in detail the resulting complex pattern of collapse-and-revival …
Vortices are commonly observed in the context of classical hydrodynamics: from whirlpools after stirring the coffee in a cup to a violent atmospheric phenomenon such as a tornado, all classical vortices are characterized by an arbitrary circulation value of the local velocity field. On the other hand the appearance of vortices with quantized circulation represents one of the fundamental signatures of macroscopic quantum phenomena. In two-dimensional superfluids quantized vortices play a key role in determining finite-temperature properties, as the superfluid phase and the normal state are sepa…
