Tuning the dipole-dipole interaction in a quantum gas with a rotating magnetic field

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a method to tune the magnetic dipole-dipole interactions in a dysprosium Bose-Einstein condensate by rotating the magnetic field, allowing control over the interaction's magnitude and sign, and enabling exploration of novel quantum states.

Contribution

The study introduces a technique to dynamically control dipolar interactions in a quantum gas using a rotating magnetic field, including the ability to nullify the interaction at a specific angle.

Findings

The dipolar mean-field energy can be tuned and even eliminated.

The condensate's aspect ratio after expansion reflects the interaction tuning.

Near the magic angle, the condensate behaves like a non-dipolar gas.

Abstract

We demonstrate the tuning of the magnetic dipole-dipole interaction (DDI) within a dysprosium Bose-Einstein condensate by rapidly rotating the orientation of the atomic dipoles. The tunability of the dipolar mean-field energy manifests as a modified gas aspect ratio after time-of-flight expansion. We demonstrate that both the magnitude and the sign of the DDI can be tuned using this technique. In particular, we show that a magic rotation angle exists at which the mean-field DDI can be eliminated, and at this angle, we observe that the expansion dynamics of the condensate is close to that predicted for a non-dipolar gas. The ability to tune the strength of the DDI opens new avenues toward the creation of exotic soliton and vortex states as well as unusual quantum lattice phases and Weyl superfluids.