Nonequilibrium phase transition with gravitational-like interaction in a cloud of cold atoms.

Title Nonequilibrium phase transition with gravitational-like interaction in a cloud of cold atoms

Cold atoms in double-well optical lattices

Cold atoms, loaded into an optical lattice with double-well sites, are considered. Pseudospin representation for an effective Hamiltonian is derived. The system in equilibrium displays two phases, ordered and disordered. The second-order phase transition between the phases can be driven either by temperature or by changing the system parameters. Collective pseudospin excitations have a gap disa...

Dynamic stimulation of quantum coherence in systems of lattice bosons.

Thermal fluctuations tend to destroy long-range phase correlations. Consequently, bosons in a lattice will undergo a transition from a phase-coherent superfluid as the temperature rises. Contrary to common intuition, however, we show that nonequilibrium driving can be used to reverse this thermal decoherence. This is possible because the energy distribution at equilibrium is rarely optimal for ...

Majorana fermions in equilibrium and in driven cold-atom quantum wires.

We introduce a new approach to create and detect Majorana fermions using optically trapped 1D fermionic atoms. In our proposed setup, two internal states of the atoms couple via an optical Raman transition-simultaneously inducing an effective spin-orbit interaction and magnetic field-while a background molecular BEC cloud generates s-wave pairing for the atoms. The resulting cold-atom quantum w...

Antiferromagnetic phase transition in a nonequilibrium lattice of Rydberg atoms

We study a driven-dissipative system of atoms in the presence of laser excitation to a Rydberg state and spontaneous emission. The atoms interact via the blockade effect, whereby an atom in the Rydberg state shifts the Rydberg level of neighboring atoms. We use mean-field theory to study how the Rydberg population varies in space. As the laser frequency changes, there is a continuous transition...