Cappellaro Alberto, Macrì Tommaso, Bertacco Giovanni F, Salasnich Luca
Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia "Galileo Galilei", Università di Padova, via Marzolo 8, 35131, Padova, Italy.
Departamento de Física Teorica e Experimental, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, and International Institute of Physics, 59070-405, Natal-RN, Brazil.
Sci Rep. 2017 Oct 17;7(1):13358. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-13647-y.
Laser induced transitions between internal states of atoms have been playing a fundamental role to manipulate atomic clouds for many decades. In absence of interactions each atom behaves independently and their coherent quantum dynamics is described by the Rabi model. Since the experimental observation of Bose condensation in dilute gases, static and dynamical properties of multicomponent quantum gases have been extensively investigated. Moreover, at very low temperatures quantum fluctuations crucially affect the equation of state of many-body systems. Here we study the effects of quantum fluctuations on a Rabi-coupled two-component Bose gas of interacting alkali atoms. The divergent zero-point energy of gapless and gapped elementary excitations of the uniform system is properly regularized obtaining a meaningful analytical expression for the beyond-mean-field equation of state. In the case of attractive inter-particle interaction we show that the quantum pressure arising from Gaussian fluctuations can prevent the collapse of the mixture with the creation of a self-bound droplet. We characterize the droplet phase and discover an energetic instability above a critical Rabi frequency provoking the evaporation of the droplet. Finally, we suggest an experiment to observe such quantum droplets using Rabi-coupled internal states of K atoms.
几十年来,激光诱导的原子内部态之间的跃迁在操控原子云方面一直起着基础性作用。在没有相互作用的情况下,每个原子独立行为,其相干量子动力学由拉比模型描述。自从在稀薄气体中实验观测到玻色凝聚以来,多分量量子气体的静态和动态性质得到了广泛研究。此外,在极低温度下,量子涨落对多体系统的状态方程有至关重要的影响。在此,我们研究量子涨落对相互作用的碱金属原子的拉比耦合双分量玻色气体的影响。对均匀系统无隙和有隙元激发的发散零点能量进行适当正则化,得到了超越平均场状态方程的有意义解析表达式。在粒子间吸引相互作用的情况下,我们表明由高斯涨落产生的量子压力可以通过形成自束缚液滴来防止混合物的坍缩。我们对液滴相进行了表征,并发现高于临界拉比频率时存在能量不稳定性,会引发液滴的蒸发。最后,我们提出了一个利用钾原子的拉比耦合内部态来观测这种量子液滴的实验。