Production and characterization of a fragmented spinor Bose-Einstein condensate

Understand

Understanding the ground state of many-body fluids is a central question of statistical physics.

• Usually for weakly interacting Bose gases, most particles occupy the same state, corresponding to a Bose--Einstein condensate.
• However, another scenario may occur with the emergence of several, macroscopically populated single-particle states.
• The observation of such fragmented states remained elusive so far, due to their fragility to external perturbations.