Collective excitations of degenerate Fermi gases in anisotropic parabolic traps

The hydrodynamic low-frequency oscillations of highly degenerate Fermi gases trapped in anisotropic harmonic potentials are investigated. Despite the lack of an obvious spatial symmetry the wave-equation turns out to be separable in elliptical coordinates, similar to a corresponding result established earlier for Bose-condensates. This result is used to give the analytical solution of the anisotropic wave equation for the hydrodynamic modes.Comment: 11 pages, Revte

Bose-Einstein condensation in shallow traps

In this paper we study the properties of Bose-Einstein condensates in shallow traps. We discuss the case of a Gaussian potential, but many of our results apply also to the traps having a small quadratic anharmonicity. We show the errors introduced when a Gaussian potential is approximated with a parabolic potential, these errors can be quite large for realistic optical trap parameter values. We study the behavior of the condensate fraction as a function of trap depth and temperature and calculate the chemical potential of the condensate in a Gaussian trap. Finally we calculate the frequencies of the collective excitations in shallow spherically symmetric and 1D traps.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Hydrodynamic excitations of Bose condensates in anisotropic traps

The collective excitations of Bose condensates in anisotropic axially symmetric harmonic traps are investigated in the hydrodynamic and Thomas-Fermi limit. We identify an additional conserved quantity, besides the axial angular momentum and the total energy, and separate the wave equation in elliptic coordinates. The solution is reduced to the algebraic problem of diagonalizing finite dimensional matrices. The classical quasi-particle dynamics in the local density approximation for energies of the order of the chemical potential is shown to be chaotic.Comment: 4 pages revtex including 1 table, and 1 figure in postscrip

Damping of low-energy excitations of a trapped Bose condensate at finite temperatures

We present the theory of damping of low-energy excitations of a trapped Bose condensate at finite temperatures, where the damping is provided by the interaction of these excitations with the thermal excitations. We emphasize the key role of stochastization in the behavior of the thermal excitations for damping in non-spherical traps. The damping rates of the lowest excitations, following from our theory, are in fair agreement with the data of recent JILA and MIT experiments. The damping of quasiclassical excitations is determined by the condensate boundary region, and the result for the damping rate is drastically different from that in a spatially homogeneous gas.Comment: 10 pages RevTeX, correction of the misprints and addition of the sentence clarifying the result for quasiclassical excitationscorrection of the misprints and addition of the sentence clarifying the result for quasiclassical excitation

On the stability of standing matter waves in a trap

We discuss excited Bose-condensed states and find the criterion of dynamical stability of a kink-wise state, i.e., a standing matter wave with one nodal plane perpendicular to the axis of a cylindrical trap. The dynamical stability requires a strong radial confinement corresponding to the radial frequency larger than the mean-field interparticle interaction. We address the question of thermodynamic instability related to the presence of excitations with negative energy.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Dielectric formalism and damping of collective modes in trapped Bose-Einstein condensed gases

We present the general dielectric formalism for Bose-Einstein condensed systems in external potential at finite temperatures. On the basis of a model arising within this framework as a first approximation in an intermediate temperature region for large condensate we calculate the damping of low-energy excitations in the collisionless regime.Comment: 4 pages, no figures, RevTe

Classical quasi-particle dynamics in trapped Bose condensates

The dynamics of quasi-particles in repulsive Bose condensates in a harmonic trap is studied in the classical limit. In isotropic traps the classical motion is integrable and separable in spherical coordinates. In anisotropic traps the classical dynamics is found, in general, to be nonintegrable. For quasi-particle energies E much smaller than thechemical potential, besides the conserved quasi-particle energy, we identify two additional nearly conserved phase-space functions. These render the dynamics inside the condensate (collective dynamics) integrable asymptotically for E/chemical potential very small. However, there coexists at the same energy a dynamics confined to the surface of the condensate, which is governed by a classical Hartree-Fock Hamiltonian. We find that also this dynamics becomes integrable for E/chemical potential very small, because of the appearance of an adiabatic invariant. For E/chemical potential of order 1 a large portion of the phase-space supports chaotic motion, both, for the Bogoliubov Hamiltonian and its Hartree-Fock approximant. To exemplify this we exhibit Poincar\'e surface of sections for harmonic traps with the cylindrical symmetry and anisotropy found in TOP traps. For E/chemical potential very large the dynamics is again governed by the Hartree-Fock Hamiltonian. In the case with cylindrical symmetry it becomes quasi-integrable because the remaining small chaotic components in phase space are tightly confined by tori.Comment: 13 pages Latex, 6 eps.gz-figure

Dynamics of Bose condensed gases in highly deformed traps

We provide a unified investigation of normal modes and sound propagation at zero temperature in Bose condensed gases confined in highly asymmetric harmonic traps and interacting with repulsive forces. By using hydrodynamic theory for superfluids we obtain explicit analytic results for the dispersion law of the low energy discretized modes for both cigar and disk shaped geometries, including the regime of large quantum numbers where discrete modes can be identified with phonons. The correspondence with sound propagation in cylindrical traps and the one-dimensional nature of cigar type configurations are explicitly discussed.Comment: 12 pages Revtex, no figure

Bose-Einstein condensation in quasi2D trapped gases

We discuss BEC in (quasi)2D trapped gases and find that well below the transition temperature $T_c$ the equilibrium state is a true condensate, whereas at intermediate temperatures $T<T_c$ one has a quasicondensate (condensate with fluctuating phase). The mean-field interaction in a quasi2D gas is sensitive to the frequency $\omega_0$ of the (tight) confinement in the "frozen" direction, and one can switch the sign of the interaction by changing $\omega_0$. Variation of $\omega_0$ can also reduce the rates of inelastic processes, which opens prospects for tunable BEC in trapped quasi2D gases.Comment: 4 revtex pages, 1 figure, text is revised, figure improve

Normal Modes of a Vortex in a Trapped Bose-Einstein Condensate

A hydrodynamic description is used to study the normal modes of a vortex in a zero-temperature Bose-Einstein condensate. In the Thomas-Fermi (TF) limit, the circulating superfluid velocity far from the vortex core provides a small perturbation that splits the originally degenerate normal modes of a vortex-free condensate. The relative frequency shifts are small in all cases considered (they vanish for the lowest dipole mode with |m|=1), suggesting that the vortex is stable. The Bogoliubov equations serve to verify the existence of helical waves, similar to those of a vortex line in an unbounded weakly interacting Bose gas. In the large-condensate (small-core) limit, the condensate wave function reduces to that of a straight vortex in an unbounded condensate; the corresponding Bogoliubov equations have no bound-state solutions that are uniform along the symmetry axis and decay exponentially far from the vortex core.Comment: 15 pages, REVTEX, 2 Postscript figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. A. We have altered the material in Secs. 3B and 4 in connection with the normal modes that have |m|=1. Our present treatment satisfies the condition that the fundamental dipole mode of a condensate with (or without) a vortex should have the bare frequency $\omega_\perp