U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

PUBLICATIONS

Observation of Persistent Flow of a Bose-Einstein Condensate in a Toroidal Trap

Published

Author(s)

Changhyun Ryu, Mikkel Andersen, Pierre Clade, Vasant Natarajan, Kristian Helmerson, William D. Phillips

Abstract

We have observed the persistent flow of Bose-condensed atoms in a toroidal trap. The flow persists without decay for up to 10 s, limited only by experimental factors such as drift and trap lifetime. The quantized rotation was initiated by transferring one unit, h, of the orbital angular momentum from Laguerre-Gaussian photons to the atoms. Stable flow was only possible when the trap was multiply-connected, and was observed with a BEC fraction as small as 15%. We also created flow with two units of angular momentum, and observed its splitting into two singly-charged vortices when the trap geometry was changed from multiply- to simply-connected.
Citation
Physical Review Letters
Pub Type
Journals

Keywords

BEC, persistent flow, superfluidity, toroidal, vortex pinning

Citation

Ryu, C. , Andersen, M. , Clade, P. , Natarajan, V. , Helmerson, K. and Phillips, W. (2008), Observation of Persistent Flow of a Bose-Einstein Condensate in a Toroidal Trap, Physical Review Letters (Accessed April 19, 2024)

Created October 16, 2008