Temperature-dependent relaxation times in a trapped Bose-condensed gas

Explicit expressions for all the transport coefficients have recently been found for a trapped Bose condensed gas at finite temperatures. These transport coefficients are used to define the characteristic relaxation times, which determine the crossover between the mean-field collisionless and the two-fluid hydrodynamic regime. These relaxation times are evaluated as a function of the position in the trap potential. We show that all the relaxation times are dominated by the collisions between the condensate and the non-condensate atoms, and are much smaller than the standard classical collision time used in most of the current literature. The 1998 MIT study of the collective modes at finite temperature is shown to have been well within the two-fluid hydrodynamic regime.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev.

Frequency and damping of hydrodynamic modes in a trapped Bose-condensed gas

Recently it was shown that the Landau-Khalatnikov two-fluid hydrodynamics describes the collision-dominated region of a trapped Bose condensate interacting with a thermal cloud. We use these equations to discuss the low frequency hydrodynamic collective modes in a trapped Bose gas at finite temperatures. We derive a variational expressions based on these equations for both the frequency and damping of collective modes. A new feature is our use of frequency-dependent transport coefficients, which produce a natural cutoff by eliminating the collisionless low-density tail of the thermal cloud. Above the superfluid transition, our expression for the damping in trapped inhomogeneous gases is analogous to the result first obtained by Landau and Lifshitz for uniform classical fluids. We also use the moment method to discuss the crossover from the collisionless to the hydrodynamic region. Recent data for the monopole-quadrupole mode in the hydrodynamic region of a trapped gas of metastable $^4$He is discussed. We also present calculations for the damping of the analogous $m=0$ monopole-quadrupole condensate mode in the superfluid phase.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures, submitted to Physical Review

Two-fluid hydrodynamics of a Bose gas including damping from normal fluid transport coefficients

We extend our recent work on the two-fluid hydrodynamics of the condensate and non-condensate in a trapped Bose gas by including the dissipation associated with viscosity and thermal conduction. For purposes of illustration, we consider the hydrodynamic modes in the case of a uniform Bose gas. A finite thermal conductivity and shear viscosity give rise to a damping of the first and second sound modes in addition to that found previously due to the lack of diffusive equilibrium between the condensate and non-condensate. The relaxational mode associated with this equilibration process is strongly coupled to thermal fluctuations and reduces to the usual thermal diffusion mode above the Bose-Einstein transition. In contrast to the standard Landau two-fluid hydrodynamics, we predict a damped mode centered at zero frequency, in addition to the usual second sound doublet.Comment: 18 pages, revtex, 4 postscript figures, Submitted to the Canadian Journal of Physics for the Boris Stoicheff Festschrift issu

Finite temperature theory of the scissors mode in a Bose gas using the moment method

We use a generalized Gross-Pitaevskii equation for the condensate and a semi-classical kinetic equation for the noncondensate atoms to discuss the scissors mode in a trapped Bose-condensed gas at finite temperatures. Both equations include the effect of $C_{12}$ collisions between the condensate and noncondensate atoms. We solve the coupled moment equations describing oscillations of the quadrupole moments of the condensate and noncondensate components to find the collective mode frequencies and collisional damping rates as a function of temperature. Our calculations extend those of Gu\'ery-Odelin and Stringari at T=0 and in the normal phase. They complement the numerical results of Jackson and Zaremba, although Landau damping is left out of our approach. Our results are also used to calculate the quadrupole response function, which is related to the moment of inertia. It is shown explicitly that the moment of inertia of a trapped Bose gas at finite temperatures involves a sum of an irrotational component from the condensate and a rotational component from the thermal cloud atoms.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figure