Spin domain formation in spinor Bose-Einstein condensation

Abstract

The spatial structure of the spinor Bose-Einstein condensates with the spin degrees of freedom is analyzed based on the generalized Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GP) in the light of the present spin domain experiment on m_F=\pm 1, and 0 of the hyperfine state F=1 of ^{23}Na atom gases. The GP solutions in three- and one-spatial dimensional cases reproduce the observed spin domain structures, revealing the length scale associated with the existence of the weak interaction of the spin-spin channel, other than the ordinary coherence length related to the density-density channel. The obtained domain structure in GP is compared with the result in Thomas-Fermi approximation. The former solution is found to better describe the observed features than the latter.

9 pages, 14 figures