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arXiv:1807.02448 · Zeitschrift für Naturforschung A

Stability and Metastability of Trapless Bose-Einstein Condensates and Quantum Liquids

Konstantin G. Zloshchastiev

Published Jun 23, 2017• 23 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract Various kinds of Bose-Einstein condensates are considered, which evolve without any geometric constraints or external trap potentials including gravitational. For studies of their collective oscillations and stability, including the metastability and macroscopic tunneling phenomena, both the variational approach and the Vakhitov-Kolokolov (VK) criterion are employed; calculations are done for condensates of an arbitrary spatial dimension. It is determined that that the trapless condensate described by the logarithmic wave equation is essentially stable, regardless of its dimensionality, while the trapless condensates described by wave equations of a polynomial type with respect to the wavefunction, such as the Gross-Pitaevskii (cubic), cubic-quintic, and so on, are at best metastable. This means that trapless “polynomial” condensates are unstable against spontaneous delocalization caused by fluctuations of their width, density and energy, leading to a finite lifetime.

DOI
10.1515/zna-2017-0134

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Abstract Various kinds of Bose-Einstein condensates are considered, which evolve without any geometric constraints or external trap potentials including gravitational. For studies of their collective oscillations and stability, including the metastability and macroscopic tunneling phenomena, both the variational approach and the Vakhitov-Kolokolov (VK) criterion are employed; calculations are done for condensates of an arbitrary spatial dimension. It is determined that that the trapless condensate described by the logarithmic wave equation is essentially stable, regardless of its dimensionality, while the trapless condensates described by wave equations of a polynomial type with respect to the wavefunction, such as the Gross-Pitaevskii (cubic), cubic-quintic, and so on, are at best metastable. This means that trapless “polynomial” condensates are unstable against spontaneous delocalization caused by fluctuations of their width, density and energy, leading to a finite lifetime.
In three-dimensional trapped Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), described by the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii-Ginzburg equation, we study the effect of initial conditions on stability using a Gaussian variational approach and exact numerical simulations. We also discuss the validity of the criterion for stability suggested by Vakhitov and Kolokolov. The maximum initial chirp (initial focusing defocusing of cloud) that can lead a stable condensate to collapse even before the number of atoms reaches its critical limit is obtained for several specific cases. When we consider two- and three-body nonlinear terms, with negative cubic and positive quintic terms, we have the conditions for the existence of two phases in the condensate. In this case, the magnitude of the oscillations between the two phases are studied considering sufficient large initial chirps. The occurrence of collapse in a BEC with repulsive two-body interaction is also shown to be possible.
The decay of Bose-Einstein condensates from a metastable ground state into collapse due to macroscopic quantum tunneling is investigated using a semiclassical approximation to Feynman’s path integral formalism. Applying a variational ansatz of a single Gaussian to the wave function determined by the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, a special choice of the Gaussian width parameters yields a mean-field energy functional in Hamiltonian form. The temporal spatial extension of the condensate then is described in the picture of a particle moving in an external potential. In this picture the decay of the condensate wave function is investigated using the bounce trajectory method, accounting for the action of the tunneling orbit in imaginary time and quadratic fluctuations around it, the latter described by the Gelfand-Yaglom differential equation. Additionally, the tunneling formalism is used for describing the condensate wave function by a trial function of a superposition of several Gaussians. Using this ansatz a Hamiltonian form of the mean-field energy does not exist and the formalism of describing the tunneling process has to be extended. The bounce trajectory is described in the parameter space of the Gaussian width parameters and the equations of motion for the imaginary time evolution are obtained by applying a time-dependent variational principle. The action of the bounce trajectory is investigated as a function of the number of Gaussians taken into account and the contribution of the fluctuations is evaluated using the monodromy matrix.
We study the stabilization of a trapless Bose-Einstein condensate by analysing the mean-field Gross-Pitaevskii equation with attractive two- and three-body interactions through both analytical and numerical methods. Using the variational method we show that there is an enhancement of the condensate stability due to the inclusion of a three-body interaction in addition to the two-body interaction. We also study the stability of the condensates in the presence of the time-varying three-body interaction. Finally we confirm the stabilization of a trapless condensate from numerical simulation.
We analyse systematically, from the viewpoint of the nonlinear physics of solitary waves, the effect of the spatial dimension (D = 1,2,3) on the structure and stability of the Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) trapped in an external anisotropic parabolic potential. While for the positive scattering length the stationary ground-state solutions of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation are shown to be always stable independently of the spatial dimension, for the negative scattering length the ground-state condensate is stable only in the 1D and 2D cases, whereas in the 3D case it becomes unstable. A direct link between nonlinear modes of BECs and (bright and dark) solitary waves of the nonlinear Schrodinger equation is demonstrated for all the dimensions.
We theoretically explore the possibility of stabilizing the trapless polariton Bose-Einstein condensates (pBECs). Exploiting the variational method, we solve the associated nonlinear, complex Gross-Pitaevskii equation and derive the equation of motion for the amplitude and width of the condensate. These variational results described by ordinary differential equations are rewritten to perform a linear stability analysis to generate a stability window in the repulsive domain. A set of coupled nonlinear ordinary differential equations obtained through the variational approach are then solved by numerical simulations through the fourth-order Runge-Kutta method, which are further supported by the split-step Crank-Nicholson method, thereby setting the platform for stable pBECs. In particular, we generate a window containing system parameters in the ${g}_{1}\ensuremath{-}{\ensuremath{\gamma}}_{\text{eff}}$ space within which the system can admit stable condensates. The highlight of the results is that one observes beating effects in the real time evolution of the condensates with attractive interactions much similar to multicomponent BECs, and their periodicity can be varied by manipulating linear and nonlinear loss/gain terms. For repulsive condensates, one notices the stretching of the density.