Ring solids and supersolids in spherical shell-shaped dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates

Abstract

We study the interplay between the anisotropy of the dipole-dipole interaction and confinement in a curved geometry by means of the extended Gross-Pitaevskii equation, which allows us to characterize the ground state of a dipolar Bose gas under the confinement of a bubble trapping potential. We do so in terms of the scattering length a and the number of particles. We observe the emergence of a wide variety of dipolar solids, consisting on arrangements of different number of droplets along a ring over the equator of the spherical shell confinement. We also show that the transition between the different phases of the system can be engineered by varying a, the number of particles or the radius of the trap, parameters, which can be experimentally tuned. Finally, we show the importance of working in microgravity conditions as gravity unstabilizes the observed dipolar solids. Published by the American Physical Society 2024