Welcome to Ferdinand Claude! He has joined the Erbium team as Post-doc. Ferdinand joined us from the Quantum Fluid group of the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel.
Thomas Bland
Double the supersolid, double the fun?
Here in Innsbruck, and in Stuttgart and Pisa, clouds of ultracold dipolar atoms have recently been observed in the long-sought after supersolid state, in which there exists global phase coherence and crystalline density structure in the superfluid. Two-component dipolar gases are also now experimentally producible, with our erbium and dysprosium mixtures, however the fate of the supersolid state remains largely unknown.
Together with researchers from Hanover, we predict the existence of a binary supersolid state in which the two components form a series of alternating domains, producing an immiscible double supersolid. Remarkably, we find that a dipolar component can even induce supersolidity in a nondipolar component. In stark contrast to single-component supersolids, the number of crystal sites is not strictly limited by the condensate populations, and the density is hence substantially lower. Our results are applicable to a wide range of dipole moment combinations, marking an important step towards long-lived bulk-supersolidity.
See the pre-print here: arXiv:2203.11119, and the now published paper here: PhysRevA.106.053322
Vortices in a dysprosium gas
By stirring the magnetic field which polarizes the atoms in a dysprosium condensate, we were able to generate vortices–tiny quantum tornadoes–in a dipolar gas for the first time!
Bloch Oscillations
By letting an erbium quantum droplet fall under gravity through an optical lattice, it is possible to understand the inter-atomic interactions and quantum fluctuations through variations of the Bloch oscillation.
Quantum vortices in a dipolar gas!
We report on the observation of vortices in a dysprosium quantum gas! Together with Dr. Giacomo Lamporesi from the University of Trento, we investigate one of the most fundamental phenomenon of superfluidity: quantized vorticity. We exploit the anisotropic nature of the dipole-dipole interaction to induce angular symmetry breaking in an otherwise cylindrically symmetric pancake-shaped trap. Tilting the magnetic field towards the radial plane deforms the cloud into an ellipsoid through magnetostriction, which is then set into rotation. At stirring frequencies approaching the radial trap frequency, we observe the generation of dynamically unstable surface excitations, which cause angular momentum to be pumped into the system through vortices. In the image above, if we keep the magnetic field tilted whilst rotating the vortices arrange into a stripe configuration along the field–in close corroboration with simulations–realizing a long sought-after prediction for dipolar vortices. Tilting the field back up the vortices lose this alignment, and become isotropic in shape.
Check out the paper in Nature Physics here: Nat. Phys. The paper is also twinned with a nice write-up from Prof. Zoran Hadzibabic from the University of Cambridge, titled “When ultracold magnets swirl“
Louis defends his Masters’ thesis!
Louis held his successful defence for his Masters’ thesis this week! (and has his first paper published on the same day!) Louis will be staying on as a PhD student of the Erbium lab, here’s to the next 4 years!