Spin waves in a Bose Ferromagnet

The achievement in cooling alkali atomic gases, such as $^{87}$Rb, $^{23}$Na and $^{7}$Li, to quantum degeneracy opens up a way to study magnetism in spinor bosons, because these constituent atoms usually have a hyperfine spin degree of freedom. This article reviews several basic problems related to the ferromagnetic phase transition in spinor atomic Bose gases from a theoretical perspective. After a brief discussion on various possible origins of the ferromagnetic interactio...

We consider a spin-1/2 Bose-Einstein condensate prepared initially in a single spin projection. The two channels of excitations existing in such a system (namely density and spin waves) are discussed and we show how pure spin waves can be excited in the presence of local magnetic defects. We analyze the role played by spin excitations on the Landau superfluidity criterion and demonstrate the absence of absolute superfluidity for the antiferromagnetic condensate. In the ferrom...

Phase transitions in spinor Bose gases with ferromagnetic (FM) couplings are studied via mean-field theory. We show that an infinitesimal value of the coupling can induce a FM phase transition at a finite temperature always above the critical temperature of Bose-Einstein condensation. This contrasts sharply with the case of Fermi gases, in which the Stoner coupling $I_s$ can not lead to a FM phase transition unless it is larger than a threshold value $I_0$. The FM coupling al...

We consider two-component Bose-Einstein condensates subject to Weyl spin-orbit coupling. We obtain mean-field ground state phase diagram by variational method. In the regime where interspecies coupling is larger than intraspecies coupling, the system is found to be fully polarized and condensed at a finite momentum lying along the quantization axis. We characterize this phase by studying the excitation spectrum, the sound velocity, the quantum depletion of condensates, the sh...

We study systematically the quantum corrections to a weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensate with spin-orbit coupling. We show that quantum fluctuations, enhanced by the spin-orbit coupling, modify quantitatively the mean-field properties such as the superfluid density, spin polarizability, and sound velocity. We find that the phase boundary between the plane wave and zero momentum phases is shifted to a smaller transverse field. We also calculate the Beliaev and Landau d...

We find analytic continuous wave (cw) solutions for spinor Bose-Einstein condenates (BECs) in a magnetic field that are more general than those published to date. For particles with spin F=1 in a homogeneous one-dimensional trap, there exist cw states in which the chemical potential and wavevectors of the different spin components are different from each other. We include linear and quadratic Zeeman splitting. Linear Zeeman splitting, if the magnetic field is constant and uni...

We consider a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate in its polar ground state. We analyze magnetization waves of a finite amplitude and show that their nonlinear coupling to the density waves change the dependence of the frequency on the wavenumber dramatically. In contrary, the density wave propagation is much less modified by the nonlinearity effects. A similar phenomenon in a miscible two-component condensate is studied, too.

A phenomenological model is proposed to describe the behavior of spinor Bose-Einstein condensates. In the absence of hyperfine spin-spin interactions, Bose-Einstein condensation leads to a spontaneous magnetization at the same transition temperature. This is the so-called Bose-Einstein ferromagnetism. Including the hyperfine spin interactions, the phase diagram of the spinor condensate in an optical trap is studied and the Gross-Pitaevskii equation is extended. The possibilit...

We show that an ensemble of spinor Bose-Einstein condensates confined in a one dimensional optical lattice can undergo a ferromagnetic phase transition and spontaneous magnetization arises due to the magnetic dipole-dipole interaction. This phenomenon is analogous to ferromagnetism in solid state physics, but occurs with bosons instead of fermions.

We obtain the equations of motion for a ferromagnetic Bose condensate of arbitrary spin in the long wavelength limit. We find that the magnetization of the condensate is described by a non-trivial modification of the Landau-Lifshitz equation, in which the magnetization is advected by the superfluid velocity. This hydrodynamic description, valid when the condensate wavefunction varies on scales much longer than either the density or spin healing lengths, is physically more tra...