We study the damping of the collective excitations of Bose-Einstein condensates in a harmonic trap potential loaded in an optical lattice. In the presence of a confining potential the system is inhomogeneous and the collective excitations are characterized by a set of discrete confined phononlike excitations. We derive a general convenient analytical description for the damping rate, which takes into account the trapping potential and the optical lattice for the Landau and Beliaev processes at any temperature
T. At high temperature or weak spatial confinement, we show that both mechanisms display a linear dependence on
T. In the quantum limit, we find that the Landau damping is exponentially suppressed at low temperatures and the total damping is independent of
T. Our theoretical predictions for the damping rate under the thermal regime is in complete correspondence with the experimental values reported for the one-dimensional (1D) condensate of sodium atoms. We show that the laser intensity can tune the collision process, allowing a resonant effect for the condensate lifetime. Also, we study the influence of the attractive or repulsive nonlinear terms on the decay rate of the collective excitations. A general expression for the renormalized Goldstone frequency is obtained as a function of the 1D nonlinear self-interaction parameter, laser intensity, and temperature.
We investigate low-energy collective excitations in Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) with a single-vortex line or many vortices by using the microscopic theory based on the Bogoliubov-Popov formalism. The paper is divided into the following two section: (i) We first study the damping process of the quadrupole modes in a three-dimensional cigar-shaped BEC. The selective excitation of such the modes occurs during the rotation of the condensate in the opposite or same direction relative to a vortex velocity field. The dramatic change of the damping process of these modes is explained by the linear response theory. It is proposed that Kelvin modes play a leading part in the decay process of the quadrupole excitation. These results are quantitatively compared with the recent experiment on 87 Rb by Bretin et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 100403 (2003)]. (ii) In addition, the complete spectrum of the collective excitations in vortex-lattice states is obtained by solving the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equation in a two-dimensional disk-shaped BEC. We also discuss the frequency shift of totally symmetric and twofold symmetric Tkachenko modes.