Dr. Yuki Kawaguchi (Univ. of Tokyo)
"Topological Excitations in Spinor BECs"
One of the salient features of a gaseous Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is the internal spin degrees of freedom. In spinor BECs, namely, in BECs with internal degrees of freedom, spin and gauge degrees of freedom couple in various manners, leading to nontrivial properties of spin waves and topological excitations. In this seminar, I explain symmetry properties of various phases of spin-1 and 2 spinor BECs together with the topological excitations they can host. And then, I introduce some recent topics, such as dipole-induced spin vortices, knot solitons, and non-Abelian vortices.