Observation of fragmentation of a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 34529460.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1126/science.abd8206.
- No licence information is recorded for this record.
- Because redistribution is not established, this page shows the abstract only. Follow the links below for the full text.
Abstract
Weakly interacting Bose gases usually form Bose-Einstein condensates in which most particles occupy the same single-particle state. However, when this state cannot realize a continuous symmetry of the many-body Hamiltonian, a fragmented condensate exhibiting the expected symmetry may emerge. Here, we produced a three-fragment condensate for a mesoscopic spin-1 gas of about 100 atoms, with anti-ferromagnetic interactions and vanishing collective spin. Using a spin-resolved detection approaching single-atom resolution, we show that the reconstructed state is close to the expected many-body ground state, whereas one-body observables are the same as for a completely mixed state. Our results highlight how the interplay between symmetry and interactions generates entanglement in a mesoscopic quantum system.