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Abstract:

For many years, 4 He typified Bose-Einstein superfluids, but recent advances in dilute ultracold alkali-metal gases have provided new neutral superfluids that are particularly tractable because the system is dilute. This chapter starts with a brief review of the physics of superfluid 4 He, followed by the basic ideas of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC), first for an ideal Bose gas and then considering the effect of interparticle interactions, including time-dependent phenomena. Extensions to more exotic condensates include magnetic dipolar gases, mixtures of two components, and spinor condensates that require a focused infrared laser for trapping of all the various hyperfine magnetic states in a particular hyperfine F manifold of m F states. With an applied rotation, the trapped BECs nucleate quantized vortices. Recent theory and experiment have shown that laser coupling fields can mimic the effect of rotation. The resulting synthetic gauge fields have produced vortices in a nonrotating condensate. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.