Accidental suppression of Landau damping of the transverse breathing mode in elongated Bose-Einstein condensates

We study transverse radial oscillations of an elongated Bose-Einstein condensate using finite temperature simulations, in the context of a recent experiment at ENS. We demonstrate the existence of a mode corresponding to an in-phase collective oscillation of both the condensate and thermal cloud. Excitation of this mode accounts for the very small damping rate observed experimentally, and we find excellent quantitative agreement between experiment and theory. In contrast to other condensate modes, interatomic collisions are found to be the dominant damping mechanism in this case.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Transition to the Giant Vortex State in an Harmonic Plus Quartic Trap

We consider a rapidly rotating Bose-condensed gas in an harmonic plus quartic trap. At sufficiently high rotation rates the condensate acquires an annular geometry with the superposition of a vortex lattice. With increasing rotation rate the lattice evolves into a single ring of vortices. Of interest is the transition from this state to the giant vortex state in which the circulation is carried by only a central vortex. By analyzing the Gross-Pitaevskii energy functional variationally, we have been able to map out the phase boundary between these two states as a function of the rotation rate and the various trapped gas parameters. The variational results are in good qualitative agreement with those obtained by means of a direct numerical solution of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure

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

A Dynamical Self-Consistent Finite Temperature Kinetic Theory: The ZNG Scheme

We review a self-consistent scheme for modelling trapped weakly-interacting quantum gases at temperatures where the condensate coexists with a significant thermal cloud. This method has been applied to atomic gases by Zaremba, Nikuni, and Griffin, and is often referred to as ZNG. It describes both mean-field-dominated and hydrodynamic regimes, except at very low temperatures or in the regime of large fluctuations. Condensate dynamics are described by a dissipative Gross-Pitaevskii equation (or the corresponding quantum hydrodynamic equation with a source term), while the non-condensate evolution is represented by a quantum Boltzmann equation, which additionally includes collisional processes which transfer atoms between these two subsystems. In the mean-field-dominated regime collisions are treated perturbatively and the full distribution function is needed to describe the thermal cloud, while in the hydrodynamic regime the system is parametrised in terms of a set of local variables. Applications to finite temperature induced damping of collective modes and vortices in the mean-field-dominated regime are presented.Comment: Unedited version of chapter to appear in Quantum Gases: Finite Temperature and Non-Equilibrium Dynamics (Vol. 1 Cold Atoms Series). N.P. Proukakis, S.A. Gardiner, M.J. Davis and M.H. Szymanska, eds. Imperial College Press, London (in press). See http://www.icpress.co.uk/physics/p817.htm