A dipolar quantum gas with supersolid properties

by Giovanni Modugno (LENS, Università di Firenze and CNR-INO, Sezione di Pisa)

Tuesday 28 May 2019, 15:00 → 17:00 Europe/Rome

The possibility that a quantum crystal might show a superfluid behavior was addressed theoretically 50 years ago by Andreev and Lifshitz [1]. Such “supersolid” has been searched experimentally in solid helium, so far without success [2]. Recently, ultracold quantum gases have attracted much interest, due to the possibility of engineering types of interactions that might lead to supersolid regimes.

In this talk, I will show how a Bose-Einstein condensate of strongly magnetic atoms develops, under specific conditions, a strong periodic density modulation due to the interplay of attractive and repulsive atom- atom interactions. Despite the modulated density, the condensate keeps its phase coherence, so it has the requisites for a supersolid [3]. This observation opens an exciting new direction to study the properties of the supersolid phase of matter.

[1] A. F. Andreev and I. M. Lifshitz, Sov. Phys. JETP 29, 1107 (1969). [2] S. Balibar, Nature, 464, 176 (2010).
[3] L. Tanzi et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 130405 (2019).

2019_05_28_Modugno_slides.pdf