We study the dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates in tilted and driven optical superlattices. For a bichromatic lattice, each Bloch band splits up into two minibands such that the dynamics is governed by the interplay of Bloch oscillations and transitions between the bands. Thus, bichromatic potentials provide an excellent model system for the study of nonlinear Landau-Zener tunneling, and they allow for a variety of applications in matter-wave interferometry and quantum metrology. In the present paper, we investigate the coherent dynamics of an interacting Bose-Einstein condensate as well as its stability. Different mechanisms of instability are discussed, which lead to a rapid depletion of the condensate.
We study the Bose-Einstein condensate in a honeycomb optical lattice within Bogoliubov theory and find that for a
k=0 condensate, the Dirac points appear in the Bogoliubov excitation spectrum when
0<β<2, which illustrates that the bose-bose interaction does not change the Dirac point structure but only give a modification of the velocity of the Dirac cone. When the bosons are driven to condense at
k=K, however, we find that the topology of the Dirac points will be altered by arbitrary weak interaction. Furthermore, we find that the next-nearest-neighbor hopping in an isotropic and an anisotropic lattice has different effects to the dynamics of the condensate and it should be taken into account when the lattice is not sufficiently deep.