Alice Sinatra

Bose-Einstein Condensation in Atomic Gases

The discovery of the superfluid transition of liquid helium [1, 2] marked the first achievement of Bose–Einstein condensation in the laboratory, more than a decade after Einstein’s prediction for an ideal gas [3, 4]. Together with superconductivity, they o↵ered the first examples of macroscopic quantum phenomena and as such constituted a milestone in the history of Physics. The quest for the understanding of liquid helium superfluidity was the source of major advances in quantum many-body physics, such as the development of techniques inspired from quantum field theory and Landau’s phenomenological two-fluid model. The latter was in particular very successful for describing the hydrodynamics of this quantum liquid.

Atom-chip-based generation of entanglement for quantum metrology.

Atom chips provide a versatile quantum laboratory for experiments with ultracold atomic gases. They have been used in diverse experiments involving low-dimensional quantum gases, cavity quantum electrodynamics, atom–surface interactions, and chip-based atomic clocks and interferometers. However, a severe limitation of atom chips is that techniques to control atomic interactions and to generate entanglement have not been experimentally available so far. Such techniques enable chip-based studies of entangled many-body systems and are a key prerequisite for atom chip applications in quantum simulations, quantum information processing and quantum metrology. Here we report the experimental generation of multi-particle entanglement on an atom chip by controlling elastic collisional interactions with a state-dependent potential. We use this technique to generate spin-squeezed states of a two-component Bose–Einstein condensate; such states are a useful resource for quantum metrology. The observed reduction in spin noise of -3.7 ± 0.4 dB, combined with the spin coherence, implies four-partite entanglement between the condensate atoms; this could be used to improve an interferometric measurement by -2.5 ± 0.6 dB over the standard quantum limit. Our data show good agreement with a dynamical multi-mode simulation and allow us to reconstruct the Wigner function of the spin-squeezed condensate. The techniques reported here could be directly applied to chip-based atomic clocks, currently under development.

The truncated Wigner method for Bose-condensed gases: limits of validity and applications

We study the truncated Wigner method applied to a weakly interacting spinless Bose-condensed gas which is perturbed away from thermal equilibrium by a time-dependent external potential. The principle of the method is to generate an ensemble of classical fields ψ(r) which samples the Wigner quasi-distribution function of the initial thermal equilibrium density operator of the gas, and then to evolve each classical field with the Gross–Pitaevskii equation. In the first part of the paper we improve the sampling technique over our previous work (Sinatra et al2000 J. Mod. Opt. 47 2629–44) and we test its accuracy against the exactly solvable model of the ideal Bose gas. In the second part of the paper we investigate the conditions of validity of the truncated Wigner method. For short evolution times it is known that the time-dependent Bogoliubov approximation is valid for almost pure condensates. The requirement that the truncated Wigner method reproduces the Bogoliubov prediction leads to the constraint that the number of field modes in the Wigner simulation must be smaller than the number of particles in the gas. For longer evolution times the nonlinear dynamics of the noncondensed modes of the field plays an important role. To demonstrate this we analyse the case of a three-dimensional spatially homogeneous Bose-condensed gas and we test the ability of the truncated Wigner method to correctly reproduce the Beliaev–Landau damping of an excitation of the condensate. We have identified the mechanism which limits the validity of the truncated Wigner method: the initial ensemble of classical fields, driven by the time-dependent Gross–Pitaevskii equation, thermalizes to a classical field distribution at a temperature Tclass which is larger than the initial temperature T of the quantum gas. When Tclass significantly exceeds T a spurious damping is observed in the Wigner simulation. This leads to the second validity condition for the truncated Wigner method, Tclass − T T, which requires that the maximum energy max of the Bogoliubov modes in the simulation does not exceed a few kB T.

Optimum Spin Squeezing in Bose-Einstein Condensates with Particle Losses

The problem of spin squeezing with a bimodal condensate in the presence of particle losses is solved analytically by the Monte Carlo wave function method. We find the largest obtainable spin squeezing as a function of the one-body loss rate, the two-body and three-body rate constants, and the s-wave scattering length.

Classical-field method for time dependent Bose-Einstein condensed gases.

We propose a method to study the time evolution of Bose-Einstein condensed gases perturbed from an initial thermal equilibrium, based on the Wigner representation of the N-body density operator. We show how to generate a collection of random classical fields sampling the initial Wigner distribution in the number conserving Bogoliubov approximation. The fields are then evolved with the time dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We illustrate the method with the damping of a collective excitation of a one-dimensional Bose gas.

Enhanced and Reduced Atom Number Fluctuations in a BEC Splitter

We measure atom number statistics after splitting a gas of ultracold 87Rb atoms in a purely magnetic double-well potential created on an atom chip. Well below the critical temperature for Bose-Einstein condensation Tc, we observe reduced fluctuations down to -4.9 dB below the atom shot noise level. Fluctuations rise to more than +3.8 dB close to Tc, before reaching the shot noise level for higher temperatures. We use two-mode and classical field simulations to model these results. This allows us to confirm that the supershot noise fluctuations directly originate from quantum statistics.

Simultaneous magneto-optical trapping of two lithium isotopes

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A Monte Carlo formulation of the Bogolubov theory

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Limit of spin squeezing in finite-temperature Bose-Einstein condensates.

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Long-lived quantum memory with nuclear atomic spins.

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