We consider a two-dimensional self-bound quantum droplet, which consists of a mixture of two Bose-Einstein condensates. We start with the ground state, and then turn to the rotational response of this system, in the presence of an external (harmonic) potential. We identify various phases, depending on the atom number, the strength of the external confinement and the angular momentum. These include center of mass excitation, ghost vortices, as well as vortices of single and multiple quantization. According to our results, this is an excellent system for the study of superfluid states.
We show that the ground state of a dipolar Bose gas in a cylindrically symmetric harmonic trap has a rich phase diagram, including droplet crystal states in which a set of droplets arrange into a lattice pattern that breaks the rotational symmetry. An analytic model for small droplet crystals is developed and used to obtain a zero temperature phase diagram that is numerically validated. We show that in certain regimes a coherent low-density halo surrounds the droplet crystal giving rise to a novel phase with localized and extended features.
Recent experiments have revealed the formation of stable droplets in dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates. This surprising result has been explained by the stabilization given by quantum fluctuations. We study in detail the properties of a BEC in the presence of quantum stabilization. The ground-state phase diagram presents three main regimes: mean-field regime, in which the quantum correction is perturbative, droplet regime, in which quantum stabilization is crucial, and a multi-stable regime. In the absence of a multi-stable region, the condensate undergoes a crossover from the mean-field to th…
Equilibrium and non-equilibrium phases of microwave-dressed polar molecules beyond rotational symmetries
Institute for Theoretical Physics, TU Wien（维也纳工业大学理论物理研究所）；Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology, Atominstitut, TU Wien（维也纳量子科学技术中心，原子研究所，维也纳工业大学）
We investigate the effects of many-body correlations on the ground-state properties of a single component ultra-cold Rydberg-dressed Fermi liquid with purely repulsive inter-particle interactions, in both three and two spatial dimensions. We have employed the Fermi-hypernetted-chain Euler-Lagrange approximation and observed that the contribution of the correlation energy on the ground-state energy becomes significant at intermediate values of the soft-core radius and large coupling strengths. For small and large soft-core radii, the correlation energy is negligible and the ground-state energy …
We have theoretically investigated the structure of spinning self-bound droplets made of $^{41}$K-$^{87}$Rb Bose mixture by solving the Gross-Pitaevskii equation including beyond-mean-field correction in the Lee-Huang-Yang form. The structure and energetics of vortex formation in the self-bound mixture have been elucidated, showing that the formation of linear vortices in the heavier species is energetically favoured over other configurations. A fake (partially filled) core develops as a consequence in the other species, resulting in a hole which might be imaged in experiments. The interplay b…
Strongly interacting systems of dipolar bosons in three dimensions confined by harmonic traps are analyzed using the exact Path Integral Ground State Monte Carlo method. By adding a repulsive two-body potential, we find a narrow window of interaction parameters leading to stable ground- state configurations of droplets in a crystalline arrangement. We find that this effect is entirely due to the interaction present in the Hamiltonian without resorting to additional stabilizing mechanisms or specific three-body forces. We analyze the number of droplets formed in terms of the Hamiltonian paramet…
We combine experimental and theoretical approaches to explore excited rotational states of molecules embedded in helium nanodroplets using CS$_2$ and I$_2$ as examples. Laser-induced nonadiabatic molecular alignment is employed to measure spectral lines for rotational states extending beyond those initially populated at the 0.37 K droplet temperature. We construct a simple quantum mechanical model, based on a linear rotor coupled to a single-mode bosonic bath, to determine the rotational energy structure in its entirety. The calculated and measured spectral lines are in good agreement. We show…
We study the quantum-droplet state in a 3-dimensional (3D) Bose gas in the presence of 1D spin-orbit-coupling and Raman coupling, especially the stripe phase with density modulation, by numerically computing the ground state energy including the mean-field energy and Lee-HuangYang correction. In this droplet state, the stripe can exist in a wider range of Raman coupling, compared with the BEC-gas state. More intriguingly, both spin-orbit-coupling and Raman coupling strengths can be used to tune the droplet density.
We theoretically investigate the ground states and the spectrum of elementary excitations across the superfluid to droplet crystallization transition of an oblate dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate. We systematically identify regimes where spontaneous rotational symmetry breaking leads to the emergence of a supersolid phase with characteristic collective excitations, such as the Higgs amplitude mode. Furthermore, we study the dynamics across the transition and show how these supersolids can be realized with standard protocols in state-of-the-art experiments.
We analytically calculate the leading quantum corrections of the ground-state energy of two- and one-dimensional weakly interacting Rabi-coupled Bose-Bose mixtures in the frame of the Bogoliubov approximation. We show that to repulsive intraspecies and attractive interspecies interactions, the effect of quantum fluctuations favors the formation of self-bound droplets. These liquidlike states are crucially affected by the Rabi coupling, leading thus to the appearance of a quantum instability. We derive meaningful formulas to describe the droplet phase in the one-dimensional case.
We report on the observation of the scissors mode of a single dipolar quantum droplet. The existence of this mode is due to the breaking of the rotational symmetry by the dipole-dipole interaction, which is fixed along an external homogeneous magnetic field. By modulating the orientation of this magnetic field, we introduce a new spectroscopic technique for studying dipolar quantum droplets. This provides a precise probe for interactions in the system allowing to extract a background scattering length for \textsuperscript{164}Dy of $69(4)\,a_0$. Our results establish an analogy between quantum…
The ground state of a free standing, self-bound droplet comprising four hundred dipolar Bose particles with aligned dipole moments, with an additional purely repulsive two-body interaction, is investigated by Quantum Monte Carlo simulations. The focus here is on the evolution of the cluster as the effective range of the repulsive interaction is varied. We identify a ``classical'' regime, in which binding arises exclusively from the dipolar potential energy and the cluster is a quasi-one-dimensional filament, and a ``quantum'' regime of prolate droplets, held together to a significant degree by…
We demonstrate the existence of quantum droplets in two-component one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard chains. The droplets exist for any strength of repulsive intra-species interactions provided they are balanced by comparable attractive inter-species interactions. The ground-state phase diagram is presented and the different phases are characterized by examining the density profile and off-diagonal one- and two-body correlation functions. A rich variety of phases is found, including atomic superfluid gases, atomic superfluid droplets, pair superfluid droplets, pair superfluid gases and a Mott-insula…
We systematically study the effects of higher-order quantum and thermal fluctuations on the stabilization of self-bound droplets in Bose mixtures employing the time-dependent Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov theory. We calculate the ground-state energy, the droplet equilibrium density, the depletion and anomalous density of the droplets as well as the critical temperature as a function of the relevant parameters. Our findings are compared with previous analytical predictions and diffusion Monte Carlo simulations. We employ our theory together with the local density approximation for quantum and thermal…
While quantum fluctuations in binary mixtures of bosonic atoms with short-range interactions can lead to the formation of a self-bound droplet, for equal intra-component interactions but an unequal number of atoms in the two components, there is an excess part that cannot bind to the droplet. Imposing confinement, as here through periodic boundary conditions in a one-dimensional setting, the droplet becomes amalgamated with a residual condensate. The rotational properties of this compound system reveal simultaneous rigid-body and superfluid behavior in the ground state and uncover that the res…
We study the stability of quantum droplet and its associated phase transitions in ultracold Bose-Bose mixtures uniformly confined in quasi-two-dimension. We show that the confinement-induced boundary effect can be significant when increasing the atom number or reducing the confinement length, which destabilizes the quantum droplet towards the formation of a soliton bound state. In particular, as increasing the atom number we find the reentrance of soliton ground state, while the droplet is stabilized only within a finite number window that sensitively depends on the confinement length. Near th…
We develop two approximate theories to describe the miscible and immiscible droplets that can occur in a binary mixture of highly magnetic bosonic atoms. In addition to allowing simpler calculations, the approximate theories provide insight into the role of quantum fluctuations in the two regimes. Results are validated by comparison to those from the extended Gross-Pitaevskii equation. As an application we solve for the ground state droplets crossing the miscible-immiscible transition as function of the short-ranged interspecies interaction parameter. We consider regimes where the transition o…
Motivated by the recent experiments [H. Kadau et al., Nature (London) 530, 194 (2016); I. Ferrier-Barbut et al., arXiv:1601.03318] and theoretical prediction (F. Wächtler and L. Santos, arXiv:1601.04501), the ground state of a dysprosium Bose-Einstein condensate with strong dipole-dipole interaction is studied using the path-integral Monte Carlo method. It is shown that quantum fluctuation can stabilize the condensate against dipolar collapse.
Dipolar quantum droplets are exotic quantum objects that are self-bound due to the subtle balance of attraction, repulsion and quantum correlations. Here we present a systematic study of the critical atom number of these self-bound droplets, comparing the experimental results with extended mean-field Gross-Pitaevskii equation (eGPE) and quantum Monte-Carlo simulations of the dilute system. The respective theoretical predictions differ, questioning the validity of the current theoretical state-of-the-art description of quantum droplets within the eGPE framework and indicating that correlations …
We study the equilibrium properties of self-bound droplets in two-dimensional Bose mixtures employing the time-dependent Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov theory. This theory allows one to understand both the many-body and temperature effects beyond the Lee-Huang-Yang description. We calculate higher-order corrections to the excitations, the sound velocity, and the energy of the droplet. Our results for the ground-state energy are compared with the diffusion Monte Carlo data and good agreement is found. The behavior of the depletion and anomalous density of the droplet is also discussed. At finite tempe…
We study the beyond-mean-field corrections to the energy of a dipolar Bose gas confined to two dimensions by a box potential with dipoles oriented in plane. At a critical strength of the dipolar interaction the system becomes unstable on the mean field level. We find that the ground state of the gas is strongly influenced by the corrections, leading to formation of a self-bound droplet, in analogy to the free space case. Properties of the droplet state can be found by minimizing the extended Gross-Pitaevskii energy functional. In the limit of strong confinement we show analytically that the co…
We systematically investigate the properties of three-dimensional dipolar binary Bose mixture at low temperatures. A set of coupled self-consistent equations of motion are derived for the two condensates. In the homogeneous case, useful analytical formulas for the condensate depletion, the anomalous density, the ground-state energy, and the equation of state are obtained. The theory is extended to the inhomogeneous case and the importance of the inhomogeneity is highlighted. Our results open up a new avenue for studying dipolar mixture droplets. Impacts of the dipole-dipole interaction on the …
Recently achieved two-component dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates open exciting possibilities for the study of mixtures of ultra-dilute quantum liquids. While non-dipolar self-bound mixtures are necessarily miscible with an approximately fixed ratio between the two densities, the density ratio for the dipolar case is free. As a result, self-bound dipolar mixtures present qualitatively novel and much richer physics, characterized by three possible ground-state phases: miscible, symmetric immiscible and asymmetric immiscible, which may in principle occur at any population imbalance. Self-bound i…
Gases of doubly-dipolar particles, with both magnetic and electric dipole moments, offer intriguing novel possibilities. We show that the interplay between doubly-dipolar interactions, quantum stabilization, and external confinement results in a rich ground-state physics of supersolids and incoherent droplet arrays in doubly-dipolar condensates. Our study reveals novel possibilities for engineering quantum droplets and droplet supersolids, including supersolid-supersolid transitions and the realization of supersolid arrays of pancake droplets.
Ultracold atoms offer valuable opportunities where interparticle interactions can be controlled at will. In particular, by extinguishing the two-body interaction, one can realize unique systems governed by the three-body interaction, which is otherwise hidden behind the two-body interaction. Here we study one-dimensional bosons with a weak three-body attraction and show that they form few-body bound states as well as a many-body droplet stabilized by the quantum mechanical effect. Their binding energies relative to that of three bosons are all universal and the ground-state energy of the dilut…
We investigate the formation of self-bound quantum droplets in a one-dimensional binary mixture of bosonic atoms, applying the method of numerical diagonalization of the full Hamiltonian. The excitation spectra and ground-state pair correlations signal the formation of a few-boson droplet when crossing the region of critical inter-species interactions. The self-binding affects the rotational excitations, displaying a change in the energy dispersion from negative curvature, associated with superfluidity in the many-body limit, to a nearly parabolic curvature indicative of rigid body rotation. W…
We investigate a two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate that is optically driven via a retro-reflecting mirror, forming a single optical feedback loop. This induces a peculiar type of long-range atomic interaction with highly oscillatory behavior, and we show here how the sign of the underlying interaction potential can be controlled by additional optical elements and external fields. This additional tunability enriches the behavior of the system substantially, and gives rise to a surprising range of new ground states of the condensate. In particular, we find the emergence of self-bound crys…
We define a formalism of a self-consistent description of the ground state of a weakly interacting Bose system, accounting for higher order terms in expansion of energy in the diluteness parameter. The approach is designed to be applied to a Bose-Bose mixture in a regime of weak collapse where quantum fluctuations lead to stabilization of the system and formation of quantum liquid droplets. The approach is based on the Generalized Gross -- Pitaevskii equation accounting for quantum depletion and anomalous density terms. The equation is self-consistently coupled to modified Bogoliubov equations…
We analyze some issues related to the stability and free expansion of a one-dimensional logarithmic Bose-Einstein condensate, particularly its eventual relation to the formation of quantum droplet-type configurations. We prove that the corresponding properties, such as the energy of the associated N-body ground state, differ substantially with respect to its three-dimensional counterpart. Consequently, the free velocity expansion also shows differences with respect to the three-dimensional system when logarithmic interactions are taken into account. The one-dimensional logarithmic condensate t…
We study theoretically and experimentally the emergence of supersolid properties in a dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate. The theory reveals a ground state phase diagram with three distinct regimes - a regular Bose-Einstein condensate, incoherent and coherent arrays of quantum droplets. In the latter the droplets are connected by a finite superfluid density, which leads - in addition to the periodic density modulation - to a robust phase coherence throughout the whole system. We further theoretically demonstrate that we are able to dynamically approach the ground state in our experiment and that…
We systematically investigate the ground-state properties of self-bound droplets of quasi-two-dimensional binary Bose gases by using the Gaussian state theory. We find that quantum droplets consists two macroscopic squeezed phases and a macroscopic coherent phase. We map out the phase diagram and determine all phase boundaries via both numerical and nearly analytical methods. In particular, we find three easily accessible signatures for the quantum phases and the stablization mechanism of the self-bound droplets by precisely measuring their radial size. Our studies indicate that binary droplet…
Ultracold dipolar droplets have been realized in a series of ground-breaking experiments, where the stability of the droplet state is attributed to beyond-mean-field effects in the form of the celebrated Lee-Huang-Yang (LHY) correction. We scrutinize the dipolar droplet states in a one-dimensional context using a combination of analytical and numerical approaches, and identify experimentally viable parameters for accessing our findings for future experiments. In particular we identify regimes of stability in the restricted geometry, finding multiple roton instabilities as well as regions suppo…
We present experimental evidence of photon droplets in an attractive (focusing) nonlocal nonlinear medium. Photon droplets are self-bound, finite-sized states of light that are robust to size and shape perturbations due to a balance of competing attractive and repulsive forces. It has recently been shown theoretically, via a multipole expansion of the nonlocal nonlinearity, that the self-bound state arises due to competition between the s-wave and d-wave nonlinear terms, together with diffraction. The theoretical photon droplet framework encompasses both a soliton-like stationary ground state …
