Journal
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
Volume 2, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/srep00352
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Funding
- U.S. Department of Energy through the LANL/LDRD
- Australian Research Council through the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum-Atom Optics
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Phase transitions are usually treated as equilibrium phenomena, which yields telltale universality classes with scaling behavior of relaxation time and healing length. However, in second-order phase transitions relaxation time diverges near the critical point (critical slowing down). Therefore, every such transition traversed at a finite rate is a non-equilibrium process. Kibble-Zurek mechanism (KZM) captures this basic physics, predicting sizes of domains - fragments of broken symmetry - and the density of topological defects, long-lived relics of symmetry breaking that can survive long after the transition. To test KZM we simulate Bose-Einstein condensation in a ring using stochastic Gross-Pitaevskii equation and show that BEC formation can spontaneously generate quantized circulation of the newborn condensate. The magnitude of the resulting winding numbers and the time-lag of BEC density growth - both experimentally measurable - follow scalings predicted by KZM. Our results may also facilitate measuring the dynamical critical exponent for the BEC transition.
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