Spinor dynamics in a mixture of spin-1 and spin-2 Bose-Einstein condensates

The spinor dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates of 87Rb atoms with hyperfine spins 1 and 2 were investigated. A technique of simultaneous Ramsey interferometry was developed for individual control of the vectors of two spins with almost the same Zeeman splittings. The mixture of spinor condensates is generated in the transversely polarized spin-1 and the longitudinally polarized spin-2 states. The time evolution of the spin-1 condensate exhibits dephasing and rephasing of the Larmor precession due to the interaction with the spin-2 condensate. The scattering lengths between spin-1 and -2 atoms were estimated by comparison with the numerical simulation using the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. The proposed technique is expected to facilitate the further study of multiple spinor condensates.