Quantum Gases in a Box

For the past two decades harmonically trapped ultracold atomic gases have been used with great success to study fundamental many-body physics in a flexible experimental setting. Recently, we achieved the first atomic Bose-Einstein condensate in an essentially uniform potential of an optical-box trap [1], which has opened new possibilities for closer connections with condensed-matter systems and theories of the many-body problem that generally rely on the translational symmetry of the system. I will present recent studies of far-from-equilibrium physics that we have undertaken with this new system: the study of the (Kibble-Zurek) dynamics of spontaneous symmetry breaking in a quenched homogeneous gas [2], and the emergence of turbulence in a periodically driven quantum gas [3,4].

 

[1] A. L. Gaunt et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 200406 (2013)

[2] N. Navon et al., Science 347, 167 (2015)

[3] N. Navon et al., Nature 539, 72 (2016)

[4] N. Navon et al., arXiv:1807.07564