The expansion of Bose-Einstein condensates with quantized vortices is studied by solving numerically the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation at zero temperature. For a condensate initially trapped in a spherical harmonic potential, we confirm previous results obtained by means of variational methods showing that, after releasing the trap, the vortex core expands faster than the radius of the atomic cloud. This could make the detection of vortices feasible, by observing the depletion of the density along the axis of rotation. We find that this effect is significantly enhanced in the case of anisotropic disk-shaped traps. The results obtained as a function of the anisotropy of the initial configuration are compared with the analytic solution for a noninteracting gas in three dimensions as well as with the scaling law predicted for an interacting gas in two dimensions.
We investigate the time evolution of freely expanded Bose-Einstein condensates by measuring their aspect ratios at different times after their release from a magnetic trap. In these measurements the condensates contain no more than 9000 87Rb atoms. By varying the trapping frequency and atom number, we measure the condensate aspect ratios at different expansion times in free space. We compare our measurements with those calculated from the Thomas-Fermi model and a direct numerical solution. Under our trapping condition, the data of the time dependent aspect ratios of the freely expanded condensates reasonably agrees with the numerical calculations, but shows a clear deviation from the predictions of the Thomas-Fermi model when the atom number in the condensates is small.
In this work, we analyze the free expansion of Bose-Einstein condensates containing multicharged vortices. The atomic cloud is initially confined in a three-dimensional asymmetric harmonic trap. We apply both approximate variational solutions and numerical simulations of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. The data obtained provide a way to establish the presence as well as the multiplicity of vortices based only on the properties of the expanded cloud which can be obtained via time-of-flight measurements. In addition, several features such as the evolution of the vortex core size and the asymptotic velocity during free expansion were studied considering the atomic cloud as being released from different harmonic trap configurations.
We investigate the expansion dynamics of a Bose–Einstein condensate that consists of two components and is initially confined in a quasi-one-dimensional trap. We classify the possible initial states of the two-component condensate by taking into account the nonuniformity of the distributions of its components and construct the corresponding phase diagram in the plane of nonlinear interaction constants. The differential equations that describe the condensate evolution are derived by assuming that the condensate density and velocity depend on the spatial coordinate quadratically and linearly, respectively, which reproduces the initial equilibrium distribution of the condensate in the trap in the Thomas–Fermi approximation. We have obtained self-similar solutions of these differential equations for several important special cases and write out asymptotic formulas describing the condensate motion on long time scales, when the condensate density becomes so low that the interaction between atoms may be neglected. The problem on the dynamics of immiscible components with the formation of dispersive shock waves is considered. We compare the numerical solutions of the Gross–Pitaevskii equations with their approximate analytical solutions and numerically study the situations where the analytical method being used admits no exact solutions.
We report the effects of interaction on thermodynamic properties of a repulsive Bose-Einstein condensate confined in a harmonic trap by using the correlated potential harmonics expansion method. This many-body technique permits the use of a realistic interactomic interaction, which gives rise to the effective long-range interaction of the condensate in terms of the
s-wave scattering length. We have computed temperature (
T) dependence of the chemical potential, specific heat, condensate fraction, entropy, pressure, and the average energy per particle of a system containing a large number (
A) of
87Rb atoms in the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) trap. The repulsion among the interacting bosons results in a small but measurable drop of condensate fraction and critical temperature (
Tc), compared to those of a noninteracting condensate. These are in agreement with the experiment. Although all thermodynamic quantities have a strong dependence on
A and to a smaller extent on the interatomic interaction, our numerical calculation appears to show that a thermodynamic quantity per particle follows a universal behavior as a function of
T/Tc. This shows the importance of
Tc for all thermodynamic properties of the condensate. As expected, for
T>Tc, these properties follow those of a trapped noncondensed Bose gas.