16 research outputs found
Radial and angular rotons in trapped dipolar gases
We study Bose-Einstein condensates with purely dipolar interactions in oblate
(pancake) traps. We find that the condensate always becomes unstable to
collapse when the number of particles is sufficiently large. We analyze the
instability, and find that it is the trapped-gas analogue of the
``roton-maxon'' instability previously reported for a gas that is unconfined in
two dimensions. In addition, we find that under certain circumstances, the
condensate wave function attains a biconcave shape, with its maximum density
away from the center of the gas. These biconcave condensates become unstable
due to azimuthl excitation - an angular roton.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Stability of fermionic Feshbach molecules in a Bose-Fermi mixture
In the wake of successful experiments in Fermi condensates, experimental
attention is broadening to study resonant interactions in degenerate Bose-Fermi
mixtures. Here we consider the properties and stability of the fermionic
molecules that can be created in such a mixture near a Feshbach resonance (FR).
To do this, we consider the two-body scattering matrix in the many-body
environment, and assess its complex poles. The stability properties of these
molecules strongly depend on their centre-of-mass motion, because they must
satisfy Fermi statistics. At low centre-of-mass momenta the molecules are more
stable than in the absence of the environment (due to Pauli-blocking effects),
while at high centre-of-mass momenta nontrivial many body effects render them
somewhat less stable
Wave Mechanics of a Two Wire Atomic Beamsplitter
We consider the problem of an atomic beam propagating quantum mechanically
through an atom beam splitter. Casting the problem in an adiabatic
representation (in the spirit of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation in
molecular physics) sheds light on explicit effects due to non-adiabatic passage
of the atoms through the splitter region. We are thus able to probe the fully
three dimensional structure of the beam splitter, gathering quantitative
information about mode-mixing, splitting ratios,and reflection and transmission
probabilities
Dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates with dipole-dependent scattering length
We consider a Bose-Einstein condensate of polar molecules in a harmonic trap,
where the effective dipole may be tuned by an external field. We demonstrate
that taking into account the dependence of the scattering length on the dipole
moment is essential to reproducing the correct energies and for predicting the
stability of the condensate. We do this by comparing Gross-Pitaevskii
calculations with diffusion Monte Carlo calculations. We find very good
agreement between the results obtained by these two approaches once the dipole
dependence of the scattering length is taken into account. We also examine the
behavior of the condensate in non-isotropic traps
Bogoliubov modes of a dipolar condensate in a cylindrical trap
The calculation of properties of Bose-Einstein condensates with dipolar
interactions has proven a computationally intensive problem due to the long
range nature of the interactions, limiting the scope of applications. In
particular, the lowest lying Bogoliubov excitations in three dimensional
harmonic trap with cylindrical symmetry were so far computed in an indirect
way, by Fourier analysis of time dependent perturbations, or by approximate
variational methods. We have developed a very fast and accurate numerical
algorithm based on the Hankel transform for calculating properties of dipolar
Bose-Einstein condensates in cylindrically symmetric traps. As an application,
we are able to compute many excitation modes by directly solving the
Bogoliubov-De Gennes equations. We explore the behavior of the excited modes in
different trap geometries. We use these results to calculate the quantum
depletion of the condensate by a combination of a computation of the exact
modes and the use of a local density approximation