Beyond Mean Field Effects in Quasi-1D Dipolar Bosonic Quantum Gases: Roton Mode and Supersolid Behaviour

In a recent experiment, it has been found that by tuning the interaction strength of a dipolar Bose-Einstein Condensate confined in a quasi-1D geometry orthogonal to the polarization direction, the roton gap vanishes, while density modulations are induced in the trapped gas. This suggests the possibility of realizing a supersolid in dipolar quantum gases. Inspired by this experiment, we simulate a dipolar BEC in a ring geometry by confining the dipoles in a ”tube” orthogonal to the polarization direction and enforcing periodic boundary conditions. Our calculations are based on a Density Functional approach where the total energy density functional includes the beyond-mean-field correction of Lee-Huang-Yang, which partially accounts for quantum fluctuations. We study the ground state properties of the system by evolving in imaginary time the EulerLagrange equation derived from the variational principle. We also study the excitation spectrum of the system by solving the corresponding Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations. We find that the calculated excitation spectrum shows indeed a roton minimum, and the roton gap can become vanishingly small by reducing the effective scattering length. As the roton gap disappears, we find that the system spontaneously develops in its ground-state a periodic structure formed by denser clusters of atomic dipoles immersed in a dilute superfluid background. We find that this structure shows the hallmarks of a supersolid system, i.e. (i) a finite non-classical translational inertia and (ii) the appearance, besides the phonon mode, of the Nambu-Goldstone gapless mode corresponding to fluctuations in the phase, and related to the spontaneous breaking of the gauge symmetry.