Spinor Bose-Einstein gases
Abstract
In a spinor Bose-Einstein gas, the non-zero hyperfine spin of the gas becomes an accessible degree of freedom. At low temperature, such a gas shows both magnetic and superfluid order, and undergoes both density and spin dynamics. These lecture notes present a general overview of the properties of spinor Bose-Einstein gases. The notes are divided in five sections. In the first, we summarize basic properties of multi-component quantum fluids, focusing on the specific case of spinor Bose-Einstein gases and the role of rotational symmetry in defining their properties. Second, we consider the magnetic state of a spinor Bose-Einstein gas, highlighting effects of thermodynamics and Bose-Einstein statistics and also of spin-dependent interactions between atoms. In the third section, we discuss methods for measuring the properties of magnetically ordered quantum gases and present newly developed schemes for spin-dependent imaging. We then discuss the dynamics of spin mixing in which the spin composition of the gas evolves through the spin-dependent interactions within the gas. We discuss spin mixing first from a microscopic perspective, and then advance to discussing collective and beyond-mean-field dynamics. The fifth section reviews recent studies of the magnetic excitations of quantum-degenerate spinor Bose gases. We conclude with some perspectives on future directions for research.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1511.01575,
title = {Spinor Bose-Einstein gases},
author = {G. Edward Marti and Dan M. Stamper-Kurn},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.01575},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
70 pages, 22 figures. Lecture notes for the 2014 Enrico Fermi Summer School on Quantum Matter at Ultralow Temperatures