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Seminar on Theoretical and Computational Physics:
TitleQuantum Mass Acquisition in Spinor Bose-Einstein Condensates
SpeakerDr. Nguyen Thanh Phuc
AffiliationCenter for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS), RIKEN, Wako-shi, Saitama, Japan
DateTuesday, 02-12-2014
Time10:00 AM
LocationMeeting room, first floor, Institute of physics, 10 Dao Tan, Ba Dinh, Hanoi
AbstractHow particles acquire mass has long been a fundamental issue in physics. The Higgs mechanism in the standard model of elementary particle physics has recently been confirmed by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN,Geneva. There are also other ways that particles can acquire mass. Among them is the quantum mass acquisition, in which a massless particle or quasiparticle, i.e., the particle-like quantization of an elementary excitation, becomes massive due to quantum corrections. It is predicted to occur in a wide range of systems from high-energy to condensed-matter physics. However, its experimental observation remains elusive since the emergent mass, or equivalently the energy gap, is too small. We show that a Bose-Einstein condensate with spin degrees of freedom is an excellent candidate for the observation of such a peculiar phenomenon as the energy gap turns out to be two orders of magnitude larger than previously imagined. This extraordinarily large energy gap is a consequence of the dynamical instability caused by quantum fluctuations, i.e., fluctuations existing even at zero temperature. The propagation velocity of the resultant massive excitation mode is found to be decreased as opposed to phonons.