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Symmetry Breaking in Bose-Einstein Condensates

Masahito Ueda, Yuki Kawaguchi, Hiroki Saito, Rina Kanamoto, Tatsuya Nakajima

cond-mat.otherarXiv:cond-mat/0609171

Abstract

A gaseous Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) offers an ideal testing ground for studying symmetry breaking, because a trapped BEC system is in a mesoscopic regime, and situations exist under which symmetry breaking may or may not occur. Investigating this problem can explain why mean-field theories have been so successful in elucidating gaseous BEC systems and when many-body effects play a significant role. We substantiate these ideas in four distinct situations: namely, soliton formation in attractive BECs, vortex nucleation in rotating BECs, spontaneous magnetization in spinor BECs, and spin texture formation in dipolar BECs.

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