Analog Simulation of Weyl Particles with Cold Atoms

Abstract

We study theoretically, numerically, and experimentally the relaxation of a collisionless gas in a quadrupole trap after a momentum kick. The non-separability of the potential enables a quasi thermalization of the single particle distribution function even in the absence of interactions. Suprinsingly, the dynamics features an effective decoupling between the strong trapping axis and the weak trapping plane. The energy delivered during the kick is redistributed according to the symmetries of the system and satisfies the Virial theorem, allowing for the prediction of the final temperatures. We show that this behaviour is formally equivalent to the relaxation of massless relativistic Weyl fermions after a sudden displacement from the center of a harmonic trap.

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Analytic Solutions to Coherent Control of the Dirac Equation
• Simulating Dirac models with ultracold atoms in optical lattices
• Topological defect dynamics of vortex lattices in Bose--Einstein condensates
• Cross-dimensional relaxation of ${}^7$Li-${}^{87}$Rb atomic gas mixtures in a spherical-quadrupole magnetic trap
• Non-Abelian geometric potentials and spin-orbit coupling for periodically driven systems
• Synthesizing arbitrary dispersion relations in a modulated tilted optical lattice
• Quasi-thermalization of collisionless particles in quadrupole potentials
• Integrability of Dirac equations in static spherical space-times