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arXiv:2607.18944 · Physical Review Letters

Bose-Einstein Condensates in Time Dependent Traps

Yvan Castin, Ralph Dum

Published Dec 30, 1996• 777 citations
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Abstract

We present analytical results for the macroscopic wave function of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a time dependent harmonic potential. The evolution of the spatial density is a dilatation, characterized by three scaling factors which allow a classical interpretation of the dynamics. This approach is an efficient tool for the analysis of recent experimental results on the expansion and collective excitation of a condensate.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.77.5315

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We present analytical results for the macroscopic wave function of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a time dependent harmonic potential. The evolution of the spatial density is a dilatation, characterized by three scaling factors which allow a classical interpretation of the dynamics. This approach is an efficient tool for the analysis of recent experimental results on the expansion and collective excitation of a condensate.
We derive a unified set of scaling equations for Bose-Einstein condensates in time-dependent harmonic traps, connecting the weakly interacting Gaussian regime to the strongly interacting Thomas-Fermi regime. The exact Gross-Pitaevskii ground-state density is taken as a fixed profile in rescaled coordinates, with its dynamics described by three scaling factors corresponding to compression or expansion along the three spatial directions. The resulting equations contain no adjustable parameter, since their coefficients are determined once from the initial state. They recover analytically the Gaussian variational and Thomas-Fermi scaling equations in their respective limits and satisfy an axis-resolved virial theorem. The approach also yields the global phase and the low-lying collective-mode frequencies of the condensate. We benchmark the model against three-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii simulations and against measured expansion energies. The model remains accurate across all interaction regimes, in strongly anisotropic traps, and along time-dependent sequences including a relatively fast quench, up to the point where the underlying frozen-profile hypothesis, shared by all three scaling approaches, breaks down.
Free expansion of an untrapped Bose–Einstein condensate with repulsive inter-atomic interaction is studied. By use of the Zakharov's theory, time-evolution of the spatial extent of the condensate is investigated analytically. For the case that the condensate is initially confined in a harmonic trap, the characteristic time scale of the free expansion is shown to remain in the order of the inverse of the trap frequencies, regardless of the strength of the interaction. This explains consistently the time scale for the damping of the aspect ratio in the JILA and MIT experiments.
We present numerical results from solving the time-dependent nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation (NLSE) that describes an inhomogeneous, weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensate in a small harmonic trap potential at zero temperature. With this method we are able to find solutions for the NLSE for ground state condensate wave functions in one dimension or in three dimensions with spherical symmetry. These solutions corroborate previous ground state results obtained from the solution of the time-independent NLSE. Furthrmore, we can examine the time evolution of the macroscopic wave function even when the trap potential is changed on a time scale comparable to that of the condensate dynamics, a situation that can be easily achieved in magneto-optical traps. We show that there are stable solutions for atomic species with both positive and negative s-wave scattering lengths in one-dimensional (1D) and 3D systems for a fixed number of atoms. In both the 1D and 3D cases, these negative scattering length solutions have solitonlike properties. In 3D, however, these solutions are only stable for a modest range of nonlinearities. We analyze the prospects for diagnosing Bose-Einstein condensation in a trap using several experiments that exploit the time-dependent behavior of the condensate.
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We analyze the three-dimensional dynamic expansion of a weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensate in a harmonic trap when the spring constants of the confining potential are instantaneously reduced. Our results are compared with experimental observation from a condensate of 87Rb^{87}\mathrm{Rb}87Rb atoms.