Cavity Optomechanical Sensing and Manipulation of an Atomic Persistent Current.

This theoretical work initiates contact between two frontier disciplines of physics, namely, atomic superfluid rotation and cavity optomechanics. It considers an annular Bose-Einstein condensate, which exhibits dissipationless flow and is a paradigm of rotational quantum physics, inside a cavity excited by optical fields carrying orbital angular momentum. It provides the first platform that can sense ring Bose-Einstein condensate rotation with minimal destruction, in situ and in real time, unlike demonstrated techniques, all of which involve fully destructive measurement. It also shows how light can actively manipulate rotating matter waves by optomechanically entangling persistent currents. Our work opens up a novel and useful direction in the sensing and manipulation of atomic superflow.

Oscillation collapse in coupled quantum van der Pol oscillators.

The classical self-oscillations can collapse merely due to their mutual couplings. We investigate this oscillation collapse in quantum van der Pol oscillators. For a pair of quantum oscillators, the steady-state mean phonon number is shown to be lower than in the corresponding classical model with a Gaussian white noise that mimics quantum noise. We further show within the mean-field theory that a number of globally coupled oscillators undergo a transition from the synchronized periodic motion to the collective oscillation collapse. A quantum many-body simulation suggests that the increase in the number of oscillators leads to a lower steady-state mean phonon number, bounded below by the mean-field result.

Exact relaxation dynamics of a localized many-body state in the 1D Bose gas.

Through an exact method, we numerically solve the time evolution of the density profile for an initially localized state in the one-dimensional bosons with repulsive short-range interactions. We show that a localized state with a density notch is constructed by superposing one-hole excitations. The initial density profile overlaps the plot of the squared amplitude of a dark soliton in the weak coupling regime. We observe the localized state collapsing into a flat profile in equilibrium for a large number of particles such as N=1000. The relaxation time increases as the coupling constant decreases, which suggests the existence of off-diagonal long-range order. We show a recurrence phenomenon for a small number of particles such as N=20.

Topological winding and unwinding in metastable Bose-Einstein condensates.

Topological winding and unwinding in a quasi-one-dimensional metastable Bose-Einstein condensate are shown to be manipulated by changing the strength of interaction or the frequency of rotation. Exact diagonalization analysis reveals that quasidegenerate states emerge spontaneously near the transition point, allowing a smooth crossover between topologically distinct states. On a mean-field level, the transition is accompanied by formation of gray solitons, or density notches, which serve as an experimental signature of this phenomenon.

Phase separation of a fast rotating boson-fermion mixture in the lowest-Landau-level regime.

By minimizing the coupled mean-field energy functionals, we investigate the ground-state properties of a rotating atomic boson-fermion mixture in a two-dimensional parabolic trap. At high angular frequencies in the mean-field lowest-Landau-level regime, quantized vortices enter the bosonic condensate, and a finite number of degenerate fermions form the maximum-density-droplet state. As the boson-fermion coupling constant increases, the maximum density droplet develops into a lower-density state associated with the phase separation, revealing characteristics of a Landau-level structure.

Symmetry breaking and enhanced condensate fraction in a matter-wave bright soliton.

An exact diagonalization study reveals that a matter-wave bright soliton and the Goldstone mode are simultaneously created in a quasi-one-dimensional attractive Bose-Einstein condensate by superpositions of quasidegenerate low-lying many-body states. Upon formation of the soliton the maximum eigenvalue of the single-particle density matrix increases dramatically, indicating that a fragmented condensate converts into a single condensate as a consequence of the breaking of translation symmetry.