Abstract
This thesis discusses the experiments on 2D dipolar Bose gas of ultracold erbium atoms. Long-range and anisotropic dipole-dipole interaction induces complex orders in quantum many-body systems. Highly magnetic lanthanide atoms such as dysprosium and erbium have the largest magnetic moment in the periodic table, which has attracted significant attention in the past decades. Starting from quantum degenerate dysprosium and erbium atoms, exotic phases like quantum droplets, supersolid, dipolar quantum solid in the Hubbard regime have been studied. However, the 2D dipolar superfluid still remains understudied, despite being theoretically discussed for over two decades.
Although tremendous theories predict different phenomena in 2D dipolar superfluids, our first interest is how the superfluidity emerges in the 2D dipolar gases at finite temperature. Our observations suggest that the superfluid transition can be well described by Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition with an effective contact interaction as a function of dipolar orientation. With the 2D dipolar superfluid with strong DDI, we characterized the elementary excitation of the matter: the collective breathing mode. Our measurements establish how the competition between local and nonlocal interaction in strongly dipolar 2D superfluid retains quasi-scale invariance or strongly breaks scale invariance. By further searching the interaction parameters, we created stripes with global coherence, which are the first supersolid stripes in 2D. Experiments including measuring density fluctuation, coherence, and collective mode have been performed to understand the 2D supersolid. At last, we also observe unconventional light scattering from round-disk dipolar BECs, which provides a new possibility for atom optics.