No Arabic abstract
In experiments involving Bose condensed atoms trapped in magnetic bottles, plugging the hole in the bottle potential with a LASER beam produces a new potential with two minima, and thus a condensate order parameter (i.e. wave function) with two maxima. When the trapping potential is removed and the condensate explodes away from the trap, the two wave function maxima act as two coherent sources which exhibit amplitude interference. A simplified theoretical treatment of this experimental effect is provided by considering momentum distributions.
In this paper we extend previous hydrodynamic equations, governing the motion of Bose-Einstein-condensed fluids, to include temperature effects. This allows us to analyze some differences between a normal fluid and a Bose-Einstein-condensed one. We show that, in close analogy with superfluid He-4, a Bose-Einstein-condensed fluid exhibits the mechanocaloric and thermomechanical effects. In our approach we can explain both effects without using the hypothesis that the Bose-Einstein-condensed fluid has zero entropy. Such ideas could be investigated in existing experiments.
We solve the Gross-Pitaevskii equation to study energy transfer from an oscillating `object to a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate. Two regimes are found: for object velocities below a critical value, energy is transferred by excitation of phonons at the motion extrema; while above the critical velocity, energy transfer is via vortex formation. The second regime corresponds to significantly enhanced heating, in agreement with a recent experiment.
We relate the frequency of the scissors mode to the moment of inertia of a trapped Bose gas at finite temperature in a semi-classical approximation. We apply these theoretical results to the data obtained in our previous study of the properties of the scissors mode of a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate of $^{87}$Rb atoms as a function of the temperature. The frequency shifts that we measured show quenching of the moment of inertia of the Bose gas at temperatures below the transition temperature - the system has a lower moment of inertia that of a rigid body with the same mass distribution, because of superfluidity.
We report the first experimental observation of Beliaev damping of a collective excitation in a Bose-condensed gas. Beliaev damping is not predicted by the Gross-Pitaevskii equation and so this is one of the few experiments that tests BEC theory beyond the mean field approximation. Measurements of the amplitude of a high frequency scissors mode, show that the Beliaev process transfers energy to a lower lying mode and then back and forth between these modes. These characteristics are quite distinct from those of Landau damping, which leads to a monotonic decrease in amplitude. To enhance the Beliaev process we adjusted the geometry of the magnetic trapping potential to give a frequency ratio of 2 to 1 between two of the scissors modes of the condensate. The ratios of the trap oscillation frequencies $omega_y / omega_x$ and $omega_z / omega_x$ were changed independently, so that we could investigate the resonant coupling over a range of conditions.
We show that the change of the fluctuation spectrum near the quantum critical point (QCP) may result in the continuous change of critical exponents with temperature due to the increase in the effective dimensionality upon approach to QCP. The latter reflects the crossover from thermal fluctuations white noise mode to the quantum fluctuations regime. We investigate the critical dynamics of an exemplary system obeying the Bose-Einstein employing the Keldysh-Schwinger approach and develop the renormalization group technique that enables us to obtain analytical expressions for temperature dependencies of critical exponents.