Three-body correlation functions and recombination rates for bosons in three dimensions and one dimension

Bose-Einstein condensation of non-ground-state caesium atoms

Bose-Einstein condensates of ultracold atoms serve as low-entropy sources for a multitude of quantum-science applications, ranging from quantum simulation and quantum many-body physics to proof-of-principle experiments in quantum metrology and quantum computing. For stability reasons, in the majority of cases the energetically lowest-lying atomic spin state is used. Here, we report the Bose-Einstein condensation of caesium atoms in the Zeeman-excited mf = 2 state, realizing a non-ground-state Bose-Einstein condensate with tunable interactions and tunable loss. We identify two regions of magnetic field in which the two-body relaxation rate is low enough that condensation is possible. We characterize the phase transition and quantify the loss processes, finding unusually high three-body losses in one of the two regions. Our results open up new possibilities for the mixing of quantum-degenerate gases, for polaron and impurity physics, and in particular for the study of impurity transport in strongly correlated one-dimensional quantum wires.

Anomalous cooling of bosons by dimensional reduction

Cold atomic gases provide a remarkable testbed to study the physics of interacting many-body quantum systems. Temperatures are necessarily nonzero, but cooling to the ultralow temperatures needed for quantum simulation purposes or even simply measuring the temperatures directly on the system can prove to be very challenging tasks. Here, we implement thermometry on strongly interacting two- and one-dimensional Bose gases with high sensitivity in the nanokelvin temperature range. Our method is aided by the fact that the decay of the first-order correlation function is very sensitive to the temperature when interactions are strong. We find that there may be a substantial temperature variation when the three-dimensional quantum gas is cut into two-dimensional slices or into one-dimensional tubes. Notably, the temperature for the one-dimensional case can be much lower than the initial temperature. Our findings show that this decrease results from the interplay of dimensional reduction and strong interactions.

Suppression of Unitary Three-Body Loss in a Degenerate Bose-Fermi Mixture

We study three-body loss in an ultracold mixture of a thermal Bose gas and a degenerate Fermi gas. We find that at unitarity, where the interspecies scattering length diverges, the usual inverse-square temperature scaling of the three-body loss found in nondegenerate systems is strongly modified and reduced with the increasing degeneracy of the Fermi gas. While the reduction of loss is qualitatively explained within the few-body scattering framework, a remaining suppression provides evidence for the long-range Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida (RKKY) interactions mediated by fermions between bosons. Our model based on RKKY interactions quantitatively reproduces the data without free parameters, and predicts one order of magnitude reduction of the three-body loss coefficient in the deeply Fermi-degenerate regime.

Hybrid evaporative cooling of 133Cs atoms to Bose-Einstein condensation

The Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of ¹³³Cs atoms offers an appealing platform for studying the many-body physics of interacting Bose quantum gases, owing to the rich Feshbach resonances that can be readily achieved in the low magnetic field region. However, it is notoriously difficult to cool ¹³³Cs atoms to their quantum degeneracy. Here we report a hybrid evaporative cooling of ¹³³Cs atoms to BEC. Our approach relies on a combination of the magnetically tunable evaporation with the optical evaporation of atoms in a magnetically levitated optical dipole trap overlapping with a dimple trap. The magnetic field gradient is reduced for the magnetically tunable evaporation. The subsequent optical evaporation is performed by lowering the depth of the dimple trap. We study the dependence of the peak phase space density (PSD) and temperature on the number of atoms during the evaporation process, as well as how the PSD and atom number vary with the trap depth. The results are in excellent agreement with the equation model for evaporative cooling.

Exactly Solvable System of One-Dimensional Trapped Bosons with Short- and Long-Range Interactions

We introduce a model of trapped bosons with contact interactions as well as Coulomb repulsion or gravitational attraction in one spatial dimension. We find the exact ground-state energy and many-body wave function. The density profile and the pair-correlation function are sampled using Monte Carlo method and show a rich variety of regimes with crossovers between them. Strong attraction leads to a trapped McGuire quantum soliton. Weak repulsion results in an incompressible Laughlin-like fluid with flat density, well reproduced by a Gross-Pitaevskii equation with long-range interactions. Stronger repulsion induces Friedel oscillations and the eventual formation of a Wigner crystal.

Entanglement spreading and quasiparticle picture beyond the pair structure

The quasi-particle picture is a powerful tool to understand the entanglement spreading in many-body quantum systems after a quench. As an input, the structure of the excitations' pattern of the initial state must be provided, the common choice being pairwise-created excitations. However, several cases exile this simple assumption. In this work we investigate weakly-interacting to free quenches in one dimension. This results in a far richer excitations' pattern where multiplets with a larger number of particles are excited. We generalize the quasi-particle ansatz to such a wide class of initial states, providing a small-coupling expansion of the Rényi entropies. Our results are in perfect agreement with iTEBD numerical simulations.

Strongly Correlated Quantum Gas Prepared by Direct Laser Cooling

We create a one-dimensional strongly correlated quantum gas of ^{133}Cs atoms with attractive interactions by direct laser cooling in 300 ms. After compressing and cooling the optically trapped atoms to the vibrational ground state along two tightly confined directions, the emergence of a non-Gaussian time-of-flight distribution along the third, weakly confined direction reveals that the system enters a quantum degenerate regime. We observe a reduction of two- and three-body spatial correlations and infer that the atoms are directly cooled into a highly correlated excited metastable state, known as a super-Tonks-Girardeau gas.

Can Three-Body Recombination Purify a Quantum Gas?

Three-body recombination in quantum gases is traditionally associated with heating, but it was recently found that it can also cool the gas. We show that in a partially condensed three-dimensional homogeneous Bose gas three-body loss could even purify the sample, that is, reduce the entropy per particle and increase the condensed fraction η. We predict that the evolution of η under continuous three-body loss can, depending on small changes in the initial conditions, exhibit two qualitatively different behaviors-if it is initially above a certain critical value, η increases further, whereas clouds with lower initial η evolve towards a thermal gas. These dynamical effects should be observable under realistic experimental conditions.

Energy-Dependent Three-Body Loss in 1D Bose Gases

We study the loss of atoms in quantum Newton's cradles with a range of average energies and transverse confinements. We find that the three-body collision rate in one-dimension is strongly energy dependent, as predicted by a strictly 1D theory. We adapt the theory to atoms in waveguides, then, using detailed momentum measurements to infer all the collisions that occur, we compare the observed loss to the adapted theory and find that they agree well.

Probing the Interface of a Phase-Separated State in a Repulsive Bose-Fermi Mixture

We probe the interface between a phase-separated Bose-Fermi mixture consisting of a small Bose-Einstein condensate of ^{41}K residing in a large Fermi sea of ^{6}Li. We quantify the residual spatial overlap between the two components by measuring three-body recombination losses for variable strength of the interspecies repulsion. A comparison with a numerical mean-field model highlights the importance of the kinetic energy term for the condensed bosons in maintaining the thin interface far into the phase-separated regime. Our results demonstrate a corresponding smoothing of the phase transition in a system of finite size.

Exact Local Correlations and Full Counting Statistics for Arbitrary States of the One-Dimensional Interacting Bose Gas

We derive exact analytic expressions for the n-body local correlations in the one-dimensional Bose gas with contact repulsive interactions (Lieb-Liniger model) in the thermodynamic limit. Our results are valid for arbitrary states of the model, including ground and thermal states, stationary states after a quantum quench, and nonequilibrium steady states arising in transport settings. Calculations for these states are explicitly presented and physical consequences are critically discussed. We also show that the n-body local correlations are directly related to the full counting statistics for the particle-number fluctuations in a short interval, for which we provide an explicit analytic result.

Creation of a Bose-condensed gas of 87Rb by laser cooling

Protocols for attaining quantum degeneracy in atomic gases almost exclusively rely on evaporative cooling, a time-consuming final step associated with substantial atom loss. We demonstrate direct laser cooling of a gas of rubidium-87 (⁸⁷Rb) atoms to quantum degeneracy. The method is fast and induces little atom loss. The atoms are trapped in a two-dimensional optical lattice that enables cycles of compression to increase the density, followed by Raman sideband cooling to decrease the temperature. From a starting number of 2000 atoms, 1400 atoms reach quantum degeneracy in 300 milliseconds, as confirmed by a bimodal velocity distribution. The method should be broadly applicable to many bosonic and fermionic species and to systems where evaporative cooling is not possible.

Quantum Fluctuations in Quasi-One-Dimensional Dipolar Bose-Einstein Condensates

Recent experiments have revealed that beyond-mean-field corrections are much more relevant in weakly interacting dipolar condensates than in their nondipolar counterparts. We show that in quasi-one-dimensional geometries quantum corrections in dipolar and nondipolar condensates are strikingly different due to the peculiar momentum dependence of the dipolar interactions. The energy correction of the condensate presents not only a modified density dependence, but it may even change from attractive to repulsive at a critical density due to the surprising role played by the transversal directions. The anomalous quantum correction translates into a strongly modified physics for quantum-stabilized droplets and dipolar solitons. Moreover, and for similar reasons, quantum corrections of three-body correlations, and hence of three-body losses, are strongly modified by the dipolar interactions. This intriguing physics can be readily probed in current experiments with magnetic atoms.

Probing the Excitations of a Lieb-Liniger Gas from Weak to Strong Coupling

We probe the excitation spectrum of an ultracold one-dimensional Bose gas of cesium atoms with a repulsive contact interaction that we tune from the weakly to the strongly interacting regime via a magnetic Feshbach resonance. The dynamical structure factor, experimentally obtained using Bragg spectroscopy, is compared to integrability-based calculations valid at arbitrary interactions and finite temperatures. Our results unequivocally underlie the fact that holelike excitations, which have no counterpart in higher dimensions, actively shape the dynamical response of the gas.

Phase separation in mixtures of repulsive Fermi gases driven by mass difference

We show that phase separation must occur in a mixture of fermions with repulsive interaction if their mass difference is sufficiently large. This phenomenon is highly dimension dependent. Consequently, the density profiles of phase separated 3D mixtures are very different from those in 1D. Noting that the ferromagnetic transition of a spin-1/2 repulsive Fermi gas is the equal mass limit of the phase separation in mixtures, we show from the Bethe ansatz solution that a ferromagnetic transition will take place in the scattering states when the interaction passes through the strongly repulsive regime and becomes attractive.

Universal contact for a Tonks-Girardeau gas at finite temperature

We determine the finite-temperature momentum distribution of a strongly interacting 1D Bose gas in the Tonks-Girardeau (impenetrable-boson) limit under harmonic confinement and explore its universal properties associated to the scale invariance of the model. We show that, at difference from the unitary Fermi gas in three dimensions, the weight of its large-momentum tails--given by Tan's contact--increases with temperature and calculate the high-temperature universal second contact coefficient using a virial expansion.

Exact three-body local correlations for excited states of the 1D Bose gas

We derive an exact analytic expression for the three-body local correlations in the Lieb-Liniger model of 1D Bose gas with contact repulsion. The local three-body correlations control the thermalization and particle loss rates in the presence of terms which break integrability, as is realized in the case of 1D ultracold bosons. Our result is valid not only at finite temperature but also for a large class of nonthermal excited states in the thermodynamic limit. We present finite temperature calculations in the presence of external harmonic confinement within local density approximation, and for a highly excited state that resembles an experimentally realized configuration.