June 16, 2009 (Tuesday)
3:00 pm in Howey N110

"Low energy dynamics of spinor condensates"

Austen Lamacraft, University of Virginia

The huge amount of research activity surrouding Bose and Fermi condensates of the alkali atomic gases has given rise to many new ideas, often related to the experimental setting relative to that of conventional condensed matter physics. Arguably the biggest conceptual novelty, however, compared to superfluid 4He or the conventional s-wave superconductors, is the higher spin of the particles involved. As a result, novel kinds of magnetic ordering are expected to be more common. For example, some ground states predicted by mean-field theory have zero magnetic moment but non-vanishing nematicity (quadrupole moment). 

In this talk I will describe the possible magnetic orders in spinor Bose condensates and derive the low energy dynamics on the order parameter manifold, making connections to the analogous problem in conventional magnetism.