Striped states in a many-body system of tilted dipoles

Abstract

We study theoretically and experimentally the behavior of a strongly confined dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate in the regime of quantum-mechanical stabilization by beyond-mean-field effects. Theoretically, we demonstrate that self-organized ``striped'' ground states are predicted in the framework of the extended Gross-Pitaevskii theory. Experimentally, by tilting the magnetic dipoles we show that self-organized striped states can be generated, likely in their metastable state. Matter-wave interference experiments with multiple stripes show that there is no long-range off-diagonal order (global phase coherence). We outline a parameter range where global phase coherence could be established, thus paving the way towards the observation of supersolid states in this system.