Spin-dependent Bragg spectroscopy of a spinor Bose gas

Abstract

We develop a general theory of spin-dependent Bragg spectroscopy for spinor Bose-Einstein condensates. This spectroscopy involves using a density and spin-coupled optical probe to excite the system. We show that within the linear-response regime the momentum or energy transferred by the probe is determined by a set of density and spin-density dynamic structure factors. We derive a set of f-sum rules that provides rigorous constraints for the first energy moments of these structure factors. As an application we compute the dynamic structure factors for cases within all four distinct phases of a spin-1 condensate using Bogoliubov theory. Our results demonstrate that spin-dependent Bragg spectroscopy can be used to selectively investigate the various phonon and magnon excitation branches and will be a useful tool for advancing our understanding of spinor condensates.