posted on 2019-05-15, 00:24authored byBlair Blakie
Our work [0] predicts that an ultra-dilute gas of magnetic atoms can behave bizarrely at low temperatures
and self-organize into a crystal of droplets. Our results required a extensive computational resources that
were provided in part by the NeSI pan cluster.
While we normally think of a gas expanding to fill its container, recent breakthrough work with ultra-dilute
gases has revealed liquid-like behavior through the observation of droplets [1,2]. In our work we show that
the interplay of the trap used to confine the gas with the magnetic dipole interactions between the atoms
allows the system to organize into arrays of droplets. Furthermore, we map the conditions
under which various types of crystals can arise and show how their properties such as spacing between the
droplets can be controlled. Our work paves the way for experiments to produce an exotic dilute-supersolid
using magnetic atoms [3].
References
[0] D. Baillie and P. B. Blakie, Droplet crystal ground states of a dipolar Bose gas, Physical Review Letters 121, 195301
(2018),
[1] M. Schmitt, M. Wenzel, B. Bo ̈ttcher, I. Ferrier-Barbut, and T. Pfau, Self-bound droplets of a dilute magnetic
quantum liquid, Nature 539, 259 (2016)
[2] C. R. Cabrera, L. Tanzi, J. Sanz, B. Naylor, P. Thomas, P. Cheiney, and L. Tarruell, Quantum liquid droplets in a
mixture of Bose-Einstein condensates, Science 359, 301 (2018).
Blair Blakie: Is a professor of Physics at the University of Otago. His research work is in theoretical
quantum physics where he uses computational physics tools to predict the properties of novel
quantum gases.