21 January 2013 to 15 February 2013
Nordita
Europe/Stockholm timezone

The fate of Bose-Einstein condensate in the presence of spin-orbit coupling

7 Feb 2013, 10:00
30m
132:028 (Nordita)

132:028

Nordita

Speaker

Prof. Qi Zhou (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Description

The recent realization of synthetic gauge fields for ultra cold atoms provides physicists exciting opportunities to investigate the interplay between two fundamental phenomena in nature, Bose-Einstein condensation and spin-orbit coupling. In this talk, I will discuss a novel effect of spin-orbit coupling in bosonic systems, namely, it can destroy a high-dimensional condensate even at sufficiently low temperatures. This effect will be first demonstrated using simple examples of non-interacting bosons, which highlight the underlying physics that spin-orbit coupling qualitatively changes the single-particle Density of States at low energies. I will then turn to interacting systems, where a condensate is stabilized by interaction at zero temperature. On the other hand, condensate depletion is significantly enhanced by spin-orbit coupling. Particularly, thermal depletion becomes divergent when spin-orbit coupling becomes isotropic and interaction is spin-independent. This leads to the disappearance of a three-dimensional condensate at any finite temperature, and suggests an interesting routine to suppress the long-range order in weakly interacting atomic systems via spin-orbit coupling. I will also briefly discuss how spin-orbit coupling may fundamentally change the properties of low-dimensional bosons.

Primary author

Prof. Qi Zhou (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Presentation materials

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