BGU Physics Department

Colloquium, March 29th, 2012


Quantum Dynamics of Ultracold Attractive Bose Gases


Ofir Alon, University of Haifa at Oranim
Experiments on ultra-cold attractive Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs) have demonstrated that at low dimensions atomic clouds can form localized objects, propagating for long times without significant changes in their shapes and attributed to bright matter-wave solitons, which are coherent objects. We consider the dynamics of bright soliton trains from the perspective of many-boson physics. To this end, we solve the time-dependent many-boson Schr\\\"odinger equation with the multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree for bosons method (MCTDHB) [1,2], and compare the results with the mean-field predictions of the Gross-Pitaevskii theory. The fate of matter-wave soliton trains is actually to quickly loose their coherence and become macroscopically fragmented BECs. The death of the coherent matter-wave soliton trains gives birth to fragmented objects, whose quantum properties and experimental signatures differ substantially from what is currently assumed [3]. For more phenomena
 dealing with the non-equilibrium dynamics and fragmentation of low-dimensional attractive BECs see [4-7].


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  Lett. 99, 030402 (2007); O. E. Alon, A. I. Streltsov, and L. S.
  Cederbaum, Phys. Rev. A 77, 033613 (2008).

[2] http://MCTDHB.org/ .

[3] A. I. Streltsov, O. E. Alon, and L. S. Cederbaum, Phys. Rev. Lett.
  106, 240401 (2011).

[4] H. Buljan, M. Segev, and A. Vardi, Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 180401
  (2005).

[5] A. I. Streltsov, O. E. Alon, and L. S. Cederbaum, Phys. Rev.
  Lett. 100, 130401 (2008).

[6] C. Weiss and Y. Castin, Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 010403 (2009).

[7] A. I. Streltsov, O. E. Alon, and L. S. Cederbaum, Phys. Rev. A 80,
  043616 (2009); J. Phys. B 42, 091004 (2009).