Observation of dipole-dipole interaction in a degenerate quantum gas

We investigate thermally excited, dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates. Quasi-particle excitations of the atomic cloud cause density fluctuations which can induce the collapse of the condensate if the inter-particle interaction is attractive. Within a variational approach, we identify the collectively excited stationary states of the gas which form transition states on the way to the BEC's collapse. We analyze transition states with different $m$-fold rotational symmetry and ide...

We consider a dilute gas of dipole moments in an arbitrary harmonic trap and treat both the short-range, isotropic delta-interaction and the long-range, anisotropic dipole-dipole interaction perturbatively. With this we calculate the leading shift of the critical temperature with respect to that of an ideal gas as a function of the relative orientation of the dipole moments with respect to the harmonic trap axes. In particular, we determine those magic angles, where the dipol...

Recent experiments have revealed that beyond-mean-field corrections are much more relevant in weakly-interacting dipolar condensates than in their non-dipolar counterparts. We show that in quasi-one-dimensional geometries quantum corrections in dipolar and non-dipolar 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 ...

We study dipolar relaxation in both ultra-cold thermal and Bose-condensed chromium atom gases. We show three different ways to control dipolar relaxation, making use of either a static magnetic field, an oscillatory magnetic field, or an optical lattice to reduce the dimensionality of the gas from 3D to 2D. Although dipolar relaxation generally increases as a function of a static magnetic field intensity, we find a range of non-zero magnetic field intensities where dipolar re...

We emphasize that the macroscopic collapse of a dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate in a pancake-shaped trap occurs through local density fluctuations, rather than through a global collapse to the trap center. This hypothesis is supported by a recent experiment in a chromium condensate.

We study a system of ultra cold dipolar Bose gas atoms confined in a two-dimensional (2D) harmonic trap with a dipolar impurity implanted at the center of the trap. Due to recent experimental progress in dipolar condensates, we focused on calculating properties of dipolar impurity systems that might guide experimentalists if they choose to study impurities in dipolar gases. We used the Gross-Pitaevskii formalism solved numerically via the split-step Crank-Nicolson method. We ...

The effect of dipolar orientation with respect to the condensate plane on the mean-field dynamics of dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates in a pancake-shaped confinement is discussed. The stability of a quasi-two-dimensional condensate, with respect to the tilting angle, is found to be different from a two-dimensional layer of dipoles, indicating the relevance of the transverse extension while characterizing two-dimensional dipolar systems. An anisotropic excitation spectrum exh...

We investigate the influence of quantum fluctuations upon dipolar Bose gases by means of the Bogoliubov-de Gennes theory. Thereby, we make use of the local density approximation to evaluate the dipolar exchange interaction between the condensate and the excited particles. This allows to obtain the Bogoliubov spectrum analytically in the limit of large particle numbers. After discussing the condensate depletion and the ground-state energy correction, we derive quantum correcte...

In a combined experimental and theoretical effort, we demonstrate a novel type of dipolar system made of ultracold bosonic dipolar molecules with large magnetic dipole moments. Our dipolar molecules are formed in weakly bound Feshbach molecular states from a sample of strongly magnetic bosonic erbium atoms. We show that the ultracold magnetic molecules can carry very large dipole moments and we demonstrate how to create and characterize them, and how to change their orientati...

We demonstrate the tuning of the magnetic dipole-dipole interaction (DDI) within a dysprosium Bose-Einstein condensate by rapidly rotating the orientation of the atomic dipoles. The tunability of the dipolar mean-field energy manifests as a modified gas aspect ratio after time-of-flight expansion. We demonstrate that both the magnitude and the sign of the DDI can be tuned using this technique. In particular, we show that a magic rotation angle exists at which the mean-field D...