Ryan Barnett Abstract

Ryan Barnett
California Institute of Technology

"Classifying Novel Phases of Spinor Condensates and Their Vortices"

Spinor condensates have been at the forefront of cold atoms research since their initial realization. I'll discuss a geometrical way of visualizing the mean field ground states of these systems, and will also describe how this method will be useful for understanding the coherent spinor dynamics, collective excitations, and topological defects. For the case of spin-two condensates, curiously, there is a manifold of degenerate ground states in the physical region of the phase diagram where Rb87 and Na23 reside which does not correspond to a symmetry of the hamiltonian. We describe how this degeneracy is removed by quantum and thermal fluctuations. and present a revised phase diagram for this system. Finally, I will present recent results where a path integral formulation of these new geometrical variables is introduced.