This paper reviews recent experimental and theoretical progress concerning many-body phenomena in dilute, ultracold gases. It focuses on effects beyond standard weak-coupling descriptions, such as the Mott-Hubbard transition in optical lattices, strongly interacting gases in one and two dimensions, or lowest-Landau-level physics in quasi-two-dimensional gases in fast rotation. Strong correlations in fermionic gases are discussed in optical lattices or near-Feshbach resonances in the BCS-BEC crossover.

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Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases

Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) has been observed in a dilute gas of sodium atoms. A Bose-Einstein condensate consists of a macroscopic population of the ground state of the system, and is a coherent state of matter. In an ideal gas, this phase transition is purely quantum-statistical. The study of BEC in weakly interacting systems which can be controlled and observed with precision holds the promise of revealing new macroscopic quantum phenomena that can be understood from first principles.

Bose-Einstein condensation in a gas of sodium atoms

QUANTUM gravitational effects are usually ignored in calculations of the formation and evolution of black holes. The justification for this is that the radius of curvature of space-time outside the event horizon is very large compared to the Planck length (Għ/c3)1/2 ≈ 10−33 cm, the length scale on which quantum fluctuations of the metric are expected to be of order unity. This means that the energy density of particles created by the gravitational field is small compared to the space-time curvature. Even though quantum effects may be small locally, they may still, however, add up to produce a significant effect over the lifetime of the Universe ≈ 1017 s which is very long compared to the Planck time ≈ 10−43 s. The purpose of this letter is to show that this indeed may be the case: it seems that any black hole will create and emit particles such as neutrinos or photons at just the rate that one would expect if the black hole was a body with a temperature of (κ/2π) (ħ/2k) ≈ 10−6 (M/M)K where κ is the surface gravity of the black hole1. As a black hole emits this thermal radiation one would expect it to lose mass. This in turn would increase the surface gravity and so increase the rate of emission. The black hole would therefore have a finite life of the order of 1071 (M/M)−3 s. For a black hole of solar mass this is much longer than the age of the Universe. There might, however, be much smaller black holes which were formed by fluctuations in the early Universe2. Any such black hole of mass less than 1015 g would have evaporated by now. Near the end of its life the rate of emission would be very high and about 1030 erg would be released in the last 0.1 s. This is a fairly small explosion by astronomical standards but it is equivalent to about 1 million 1 Mton hydrogen bombs. It is often said that nothing can escape from a black hole. But in 1974, Stephen Hawking realized that, owing to quantum effects, black holes should emit particles with a thermal distribution of energies — as if the black hole had a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. In addition to putting black-hole thermodynamics on a firmer footing, this discovery led Hawking to postulate 'black hole explosions', as primordial black holes end their lives in an accelerating release of energy.

Black Hole Explosions

Annual review of condensed matter physics

It is a fundamental assumption of statistical mechanics that a closed system with many degrees of freedom ergodically samples all equal energy points in phase space. To understand the limits of this assumption, it is important to find and study systems that are not ergodic, and thus do not reach thermal equilibrium. A few complex systems have been proposed that are expected not to thermalize because their dynamics are integrable. Some nearly integrable systems of many particles have been studied numerically, and shown not to ergodically sample phase space. However, there has been no experimental demonstration of such a system with many degrees of freedom that does not approach thermal equilibrium. Here we report the preparation of out-of-equilibrium arrays of trapped one-dimensional (1D) Bose gases, each containing from 40 to 250 87Rb atoms, which do not noticeably equilibrate even after thousands of collisions. Our results are probably explainable by the well-known fact that a homogeneous 1D Bose gas with point-like collisional interactions is integrable. Until now, however, the time evolution of out-of-equilibrium 1D Bose gases has been a theoretically unsettled issue, as practical factors such as harmonic trapping and imperfectly point-like interactions may compromise integrability. The absence of damping in 1D Bose gases may lead to potential applications in force sensing and atom interferometry.

http://absimage.aps.org/image/DAMOP06/MWS_DAMOP06-2006-000603.pdf

A quantum Newton's cradle

When rotating classical fluid drops merge together, angular momentum can be advected from one to another due to the viscous shear flow at the drop interface. It remains elusive what the corresponding mechanism is in inviscid quantum fluids such as Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs). Here we report our theoretical study of an initially static BEC merging with a rotating BEC in three-dimensional space along the rotational axis. We show that a solitonlike sheet, resembling a corkscrew, spontaneously emerges at the interface. Rapid angular-momentum transfer at a constant rate universally proportional to the initial angular-momentum density is observed. Strikingly, this transfer does not necessarily involve fluid advection or drifting of the quantized vortices. We reveal that the corkscrew structure can exert a torque that directly creates angular momentum in the static BEC and annihilates angular momentum in the rotating BEC. Uncovering this intriguing angular-momentum transport mechanism may benefit our understanding of various coherent matter-wave systems, spanning from atomtronics on chips to dark matter BECs at cosmic scales.

https://link.aps.org/accepted/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.105302

Torque and Angular-Momentum Transfer in Merging Rotating Bose-Einstein Condensates.

Superfluid turbulence consisting of quantized vortices is called quantum turbulence (QT). Quantum turbulence and quantized vortices were discovered in superfluid 4He about 50 years ago, but innovation has occurred recently in this field. One is in the field of superfluid helium. Statistical quantities such as energy spectra and probability distribution function of the velocity field have been accessible both experimentally and numerically. Visualization technique has developed and succeeded in the direct visualization of quantized vortices. The other innovation is in the field of atomic Bose-Einstein condensation. The modern optical technique has enabled us to control and visualize directly the condensate and quantized vortices. Various kinds of hydrodynamic instability have been revealed. Even QT is realized experimentally. This article describes such recent developments as well as the motivation of studying QT.

Hydrodynamic Instability and Turbulence in Quantum Fluids

There has been much interest recently in the mechanism by which superfluid (quantum) turbulence can decay in liquid 4He at very low temperatures, where mutual friction has a negligible effect. As in classical turbulence, energy must probably flow from larger to smaller length scales, and it has been suggested that on the smallest scales the relevant motion is a Kelvin wave on a quantized vortex with wave number greater than the inverse vortex spacing. By considering the behaviour of a simple model it is shown by computer simulations how energy can flow to shorter length scales (higher wave numbers) in a system of Kelvin waves, and how this process can lead to a remarkably simple Kelvin-wave energy spectrum. A discussion is included of the relevance of this model to the decay of superfluid grid turbulence at a very low temperature.

Kelvin-Wave Cascades in Turbulent Superfluid 4He at Very Low Temperatures

We summarize the recent theoretical and numerical works on spin turbulence (ST) in spin-1 spinor Bose-Einstein condensates. When the system is excited from the ground state, it goes through hydrodynamic instability to ST in which the spin density vector has various disordered direction. The properties of ST depend on whether the spin-dependent interaction is ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic. ST has some characteristics different from other kinds of turbulence in quantum fluids. Firstly, the spectrum of the spin-dependent interaction energy exhibits the characteristic power law different from the usual Kolmogorov -5/3 law. Secondly, ST can show the spin-glass-like behavior; the spin density vectors are spatially random but temporally frozen.

Spin turbulence in spinor Bose-Einstein condensates

We perform a numerical simulation of the dynamics of quantized vortices produced by coflow in a square channel using the vortex filament model. Unlike the situation in thermal counterflow, where the superfluid velocity $v_{\rm s}$ and normal-fluid velocity $v_{\rm n}$ flow in opposite directions, in coflow, $v_{\rm s}$ and $v_{\rm n}$ flow in the same direction. Quantum turbulence in thermal counterflow has been long studied theoretically and experimentally, and its various features have been revealed.In recent years, an experiment on quantum turbulence in coflow has been performed to observe different features of thermal counterflow. By supposing that $v_{\rm s}$ is uniform and $v_{\rm n}$ takes the Hagen-Poiseuille profile, which is different from the experiment where $v_{\rm n}$ is thought to be turbulent, we calculate the coflow turbulence. Vortices preferentially accumulate on the surface of a cylinder for $v_{\rm s} \simeq v_{\rm n}$ by mutual friction; namely, the coflow turbulence has an attractor. How strongly the vortices are attracted depends on the temperature and velocity. The length of the vortices increases as the vortices protruding from the cylindrical attractor continue to wrap around it. As the vortices become dense on the attractor, they spread toward its interior by their repulsive interaction. Then, the superfluid velocity profile induced by the vortices gradually mimics the normal-fluid velocity profile. This is an indication of velocity matching, which is an important feature of coflow turbulence.

Makoto Tsubota

Papers

Torque and Angular-Momentum Transfer in Merging Rotating Bose-Einstein Condensates.

Hydrodynamic Instability and Turbulence in Quantum Fluids

Kelvin-Wave Cascades in Turbulent Superfluid 4He at Very Low Temperatures

Spin turbulence in spinor Bose-Einstein condensates

Coflow turbulence of superfluid 4 He in a square channel: Vortices trapped on a cylindrical attractor