SPIN-1 DROPLETS STABILIZED BY SPIN FLUCTUATIONS

2023-9-08
YOĞURT, TAHA ALPER
The interacting Bose-Einstein condensates are mechanically stabilized by an external confinement such as magnetic, or optical traps. When the confinement is removed, they exhibit an expansion or collapse behavior depending on the interaction being repulsive, or attractive, respectively. The Gross-Pitaevskii mean-field theories are generally sufficient to provide a qualitative understanding of the condensate equilibrium properties and dynamics, therefore, beyond mean-field fluctuations are considered as minor quantitative corrections. The quantum droplet phases are self-stabilized phases of the condensate, in which the attractive mean-field interaction is stabilized by the repulsive Lee-Huang-Yang fluctuations without any external trap. The droplets are studied theoretically for binary Bose mixture and dipolar condensates, and both are recently realized in the ultracold atomic gas experiments. Here we propose the spin-1 condensate as another candidate to exhibit a quantum droplet phase. We argue that the spin-1 condensates in the polar and anti-ferromagnetic order parameters can exhibit a similar self-stabilizing mechanism. We also realize an analogy between the polarized spin-1 and Rabi-coupled binary mixture condensates. The Rabi frequency $\omega_R$ and quadratic Zeeman energy $q$ can tune the Lee-Huang-Yang energy for the Rabi-coupled mixture and spin-1 gas, respectively. Furthermore, the detuning $\delta$ and linear Zeeman energy $p$ are external parameters to tune the polarization in Rabi-coupled mixture, and spin-1 gas, respectively, which can significantly change the mean-field energy. We create the phase diagram for the mechanical stability of the Rabi-coupled mixture and spin-1 gas on the parameter planes of $\omega_R-\delta$ and $q-p$, respectively. We finally address how the Bose mixture quantum droplets respond to the rotation. We find that the strongly confined quantum droplets exhibit triangular vortex lattices under rapid rotation. The properties of the vortex lattices differ from the repulsive condensates in three points. First, the change in the droplet size is only fractional at the rapid rotation limit, unlike the diverging radius of the repulsive condensate. This property can lead the way to realizing the lowest Landau level states and strongly correlated phases in the rotating ultracold gases. Secondly, the change in the core size throughout the vortex lattice is more tractable due to the finite density at the edge of the condensate. Finally, the vortex lattices are slightly distorted, which agrees with the expected vortex density profile due to the nonuniform superfluid density. In the rapid rotation limit, the droplet approaches the flat-top density profile, in which the vortex lattice is closest to a perfect periodicity.
Citation Formats
T. A. YOĞURT, “SPIN-1 DROPLETS STABILIZED BY SPIN FLUCTUATIONS,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2023.