Physical Review A
Aspects of hyperspherical adiabaticity in an atomic-gas Bose-Einstein condensate
Daisuke Kushibe, Masaki Mutou, Tōru Morishita, Shinichi Watanabe, Michio Matsuzawa
Abstract
Excitation of an atomic-gas Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in the zeroth-order ground-state channel is studied with the hyperspherical adiabatic method of Bohn et al. [Bohn et al., Phys. Rev. A 58, 584 (1998)] suitably generalized to accommodate the anisotropic trapping potential. The method exploits the system's size as an adiabatic parameter so that the explicit size dependence is immediately conducive to the virial theorem. The oscillation frequencies associated with the monopole (breathing) and quadrupole modes thus emerge naturally and converge to the well-known Thomas-Fermi limits. Analysis of the single-particle density and the projected excitation wave function shows that the excitation in the single hyperspherical ground-state channel merely represents a progressive increase in occupancy of the first excited single-particle state. The work paves the way for applying the adiabatic picture to other BEC phenomena.