Biomedical subjects

Y Castin

Publications and source records attributed to Y Castin.

14 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2004

Achieving a BCS transition in an atomic Fermi gas.

We consider a gas of cold fermionic atoms having two spin components with interactions characterized by their s-wave scattering length a. At positive scattering length the atoms form weakly bound bosonic molecules which can be evaporatively cooled to undergo Bose-Einstein condensation, whereas at negative scattering length BCS pairing can take place. It is shown that, by adiabatically tuning the scattering length a from positive to negative values, one may transform the molecular Bose-Einstein condensate into a highly degenerate atomic Fermi gas, with the ratio of temperature to Fermi temperature T/T(F) approximately 10(-2). The corresponding critical final value of k(F)/a/, which leads to the BCS transition, is found to be about one-half, where k(F) is the Fermi momentum.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2002

Critical rotation of a harmonically trapped Bose gas.

We study experimentally and theoretically a cold trapped Bose gas under critical rotation, i.e., with a rotation frequency close to the frequency of the radial confinement. We identify two regimes: the regime of explosion where the cloud expands to infinity in one direction, and the regime where the condensate spirals out of the trap as a rigid body. The former is realized for a dilute cloud, and the latter for a condensate with the interparticle interaction exceeding a critical value. This constitutes a novel system in which repulsive interactions help in maintaining particles together.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2002

Formation of a matter-wave bright soliton.

We report the production of matter-wave solitons in an ultracold lithium-7 gas. The effective interaction between atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate is tuned with a Feshbach resonance from repulsive to attractive before release in a one-dimensional optical waveguide. Propagation of the soliton without dispersion over a macroscopic distance of 1.1 millimeter is observed. A simple theoretical model explains the stability region of the soliton. These matter-wave solitons open possibilities for future applications in coherent atom optics, atom interferometry, and atom transport.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2001

Classical-field method for time dependent Bose-Einstein condensed gases.

We propose a method to study the time evolution of Bose-Einstein condensed gases perturbed from an initial thermal equilibrium, based on the Wigner representation of the N-body density operator. We show how to generate a collection of random classical fields sampling the initial Wigner distribution in the number conserving Bogoliubov approximation. The fields are then evolved with the time dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We illustrate the method with the damping of a collective excitation of a one-dimensional Bose gas.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2001

Dynamic instability of a rotating Bose-Einstein condensate.

We consider a Bose-Einstein condensate subject to a rotating harmonic potential, in connection with recent experiments leading to the formation of vortices. We use the classical hydrodynamic approximation to the nonlinear Schrödinger equation to determine almost analytically the evolution of the condensate. We predict that this evolution can exhibit dynamical instabilities, for the stirring procedure previously demonstrated at ENS and for a new stirring procedure that we put forward. These instabilities take place within the range of stirring frequency and amplitude for which vortices are produced experimentally. They provide therefore an initiating mechanism for vortex nucleation.

Journal Article↗

PubMed1996