The Projected Gross-Pitaevskii Equation for harmonically confined Bose gases

We extend the Projected Gross Pitaevskii equation formalism of Davis et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. \bf{87}, 160402 (2001)] to the experimentally relevant case of harmonic potentials. We outline a robust and accurate numerical scheme that can efficiently simulate this system. We apply this method to investigate the equilibrium properties of a harmonically trapped three-dimensional Bose gas at finite temperature, and consider the dependence of condensate fraction, position and momentum distributions, and density fluctuations on temperature. We apply the scheme to simulate an evaporative cooling process in which the preferential removal of high energy particles leads to the growth of a Bose-Einstein condensate. We show that a condensate fraction can be inferred during the dynamics even in this non-equilibrium situation.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

Critical temperature of a trapped Bose gas: comparison of theory and experiment

We apply the Projected Gross-Pitaevskii equation (PGPE) formalism to the experimental problem of the shift in critical temperature $T_c$ of a harmonically confined Bose gas as reported in Gerbier \emph{et al.} [Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{92}, 030405 (2004)]. The PGPE method includes critical fluctuations and we find the results differ from various mean-field theories, and are in best agreement with experimental data. To unequivocally observe beyond mean-field effects, however, the experimental precision must either improve by an order of magnitude, or consider more strongly interacting systems. This is the first application of a classical field method to make quantitative comparison with experiment.Comment: revtex4, four pages, three figures. v2: updated to published version. Several additions to figures, and better explanations in text in response to referee comment

Finite temperature phase diagram of a spin-1 Bose gas

We formulate a self-consistent Hartree-Fock theory for a spin-1 Bose gas at finite temperature and apply it to characterizing the phase diagram. We find that spin coherence between thermal atoms in different magnetic sub-levels develops via coherent collisions with the condensed atoms, and is a crucial factor in determining the phase diagram. We develop analytical expressions to characterize the interaction and temperature dependent shifts of the phase boundaries.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Numerical method for evolving the Projected Gross-Pitaevskii equation

In this paper we describe a method for evolving the projected Gross-Pitaevskii equation (PGPE) for a Bose gas in a harmonic oscillator potential. The central difficulty in solving this equation is the requirement that the classical field is restricted to a small set of prescribed modes that constitute the low energy classical region of the system. We present a scheme, using a Hermite-polynomial based spectral representation, that precisely implements this mode restriction and allows an efficient and accurate solution of the PGPE. We show equilibrium and non-equilibrium results from the application of the PGPE to an anisotropic trapped three-dimensional Bose gas.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures. To appear in Phys. Rev. E. Convergence results added, a few minor changes made and typos fixe

Bragg Spectroscopy of ultracold atoms loaded in an optical lattice

We study Bragg spectroscopy of ultra-cold atoms in one-dimensional optical lattices as a method for probing the excitation spectrum in the Mott insulator phase, in particular the one particle-hole excitation band. Within the framework of perturbation theory we obtain an analytical expression for the dynamic structure factor $S(q,\omega)$ and use it to calculate the imparted energy which has shown to be a relevant observable in recent experiments. We test the accuracy of our approximations by comparing them with numerically exact solutions of the Bose-Hubbard model in restricted cases and establish the limits of validity of our linear response analysis. Finally we show that when the system is deep in the Mott insulator regime, its response to the Bragg perturbation is temperature dependent. We suggest that this dependence might be used as a tool to probe temperatures of order of the Mott gap.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure