Structural transitions of nearly second order in classical dipolar gases

Abstract

Particles with repulsive power-law interactions undergo a transition from a single to a double chain (zigzag) by decreasing the confinement in the transverse direction. We theoretically characterize this transition when the particles are classical dipoles, polarized perpendicularly to the plane in which the motion occurs, and argue that this transition is of first order, even though weakly. The nature of the transition is determined by the coupling between transverse and axial modes of the chain and contrasts with the behaviour found in Coulomb systems, where the linear-zigzag transition is continuous and belongs to the universality class of the ferromagnetic transition. Our results hold for classical systems with power-law interactions $1/r^{\alpha }$ when $\alpha >2$, and show that structural transitions in dipolar systems and Rydberg atoms can offer the testbed for simulating the critical behaviour of magnets with lattice coupling.

to appear in Physical Review A

References in corpus (15)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• Ultracold atomic gases in optical lattices: mimicking condensed matter physics and beyond
• Observation of persistent flow of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a toroidal trap
• Strongly correlated 2D quantum phases with cold polar molecules: controlling the shape of the interaction potential
• Experimental demonstration of painting arbitrary and dynamic potentials for Bose-Einstein condensates
• Quantum phase transition in a two-dimensional system of dipoles
• Ultracold Fermionic Feshbach Molecules of ${}^{23}$Na${}^{40}$K
• Structural phase transitions in low-dimensional ion crystals
• Quantum zigzag transition in ion chains
• Evidence of Luttinger liquid behavior in one-dimensional dipolar quantum gases
• Spontaneous nucleation of structural defects in inhomogeneous ion chains
• Transition from a one-dimensional to a quasi-one-dimensional state in interacting quantum wires
• Topological Winding and Unwinding in Metastable Bose-Einstein Condensates
• Ground state of low dimensional dipolar gases: linear and zigzag chains
• Stability and dynamics of ion rings in linear multipole traps

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Out-of-equilibrium dynamics of quantum many-body systems with long-range interactions
• Transformer Wave Function for Quantum Long-Range models
• First- and second-order quantum phase transitions in the long-range unfrustrated antiferromagnetic Ising chain