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Dynamical instabilities of Bose-Einstein condensates at the band-edge in one-dimensional optical lattices
We report on experiments that demonstrate dynamical instability in a
Bose-Einstein condensate at the band-edge of a one-dimensional optical lattice.
The instability manifests as rapid depletion of the condensate and conversion
to a thermal cloud. We consider the collisional processes that can occur in
such a system, and perform numerical modeling of the experiments using both a
mean-field and beyond mean-field approach. We compare our numerical results to
the experimental data, and find that the Gross-Pitaevskii equation is not able
to describe this experiment. Our beyond mean-field approach, known as the
truncated Wigner method, allows us to make quantitative predictions for the
processes of parametric growth and thermalization that are observed in the
laboratory, and we find good agreement with the experimental results.Comment: v2: Added several reference