Engineering topics

Hui, Zhai

Publications and source records attributed to Hui, Zhai.

4 records

DOE OSTI2011

Paired superfluidity and fractionalized vortices in systems of spin-orbit coupled bosons

In this Rapid Communication we study finite-temperature properties of spin-1/2 interacting bosons with spin-orbit coupling in two dimensions. When the ground state has stripe order, we show that thermal fluctuations will first melt the stripe order and lead to a superfluid of boson pairs if the spin-orbit coupling is isotropic or nearly isotropic. Such a phase supports fractionalized quantum vortices. The Kosterlitz-Thouless transition from superfluid to normal state is driven by proliferation of half vortices. When the ground state is a plane-wave state, the transition to normal state is driven by conventional Kosterlitz-Thouless transition. However, the critical temperature will drop to zero for isotropic spin-orbit coupling.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

DOE OSTI2011

Stability condition of a strongly interacting boson-fermion mixture across an interspecies Feshbach resonance

We study the properties of dilute bosons immersed in a single-component Fermi sea across a broad boson-fermion Feshbach resonance. The stability of the mixture requires that the bare interaction between bosons exceeds a critical value, which is a universal function of the boson-fermion scattering length, and exhibits a maximum in the unitary region. We calculate the quantum depletion, momentum distribution, and the boson contact parameter across the resonance. The transition from condensate to molecular Fermi gas is also discussed.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

DOE OSTI2010

Spin-Orbit Coupled Spinor Bose-Einstein Condensates

An effective spin-orbit coupling can be generated in a cold atom system by engineering atom-light interactions. In this Letter we study spin-1/2 and spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates with Rashba spin-orbit coupling, and find that the condensate wave function will develop nontrivial structures. From numerical simulation we have identified two different phases. In one phase the ground state is a single plane wave, and often we find the system splits into domains and an array of vortices plays the role of a domain wall. In this phase, time-reversal symmetry is broken. In the other phase the condensate wave function is a standing wave, and it forms a spin stripe. The transition between them is driven by interactions between bosons. We also provide an analytical understanding of these results and determine the transition point between the two phases.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

DOE OSTI2010

Degeneracy of Many-Body Quantum States in an Optical Lattice under a Uniform Magnetic Field

We prove a theorem that shows the degeneracy of many-body states for particles in a periodic lattice and under a uniform magnetic field depends on the total particle number and the flux filling ratio. Noninteracting fermions and weakly interacting bosons are given as two examples. For the latter case, the phenomenon can also be physically understood in terms of destructive quantum interference of multiple symmetry-related tunneling paths between classical energy minima, which is reminiscent of the spin-parity effect discovered in magnetic molecular clusters. We also show that the quantum ground state of a mesoscopic number of bosons in this system is not a simple mean-field state but a fragmented state even for very weak interactions.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗