We investigate analytically and numerically the modulational instability of a Bose-Einstein condensate with both two- and three-body interatomic interactions and trapped in an external parabolic potential. Analytical investigations performed lead us to establish an explicit time-dependent criterion for the modulational instability of the condensate. The effects of the potential as well as of the quintic nonlinear interaction are studied. Direct numerical simulations of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation with two- and three-body interactions describing the dynamics of the condensate agree with the analytical predictions.
We investigate the modulational instability (MI) of trapped Bose–Einstein condensates with three-body and higher-order interactions employing both semi-analytical and numerical methods. Using the time-dependent variational approach, we derive variational equations for the time evolution of the amplitude, phase of modulational perturbation, and effective potential of the system. By means of an effective potential, we retrieve the corresponding MI condition of the dynamical system under consideration. The interplay between three-body interaction and higher-order interaction is discussed in detail. The semi-analytical predictions are confirmed through numerical simulations.
Motivated by the recent experiment [Nature 530 (2016) 194] in which a stable droplet in a dipolar quantum gas has been created by the interaction-induced instability, we focus on the modulation instability of an optically-trapped dipolar Bose–Einstein condensate with three-body interaction. Within the mean-field level, we analytically solve the discrete cubic-quintic Gross–Pitaevskii equation with dipole–dipole interaction loaded into a deep optical lattice and show how combined effects of the three-body interaction and dipole–dipole interaction on the condition of modulational instability. Our results show that the interplay of the three-body interaction and dipole–dipole interaction can dramatically change the modulation instability condition compared with the ordinary Gross–Pitaevskii equation. We believe that the predicted results in this work can be useful for the future possible experiment of loading a Bose–Einstein condensate of 164 Dy atoms with strong magnetic dipole–dipole interaction into an optical lattice.