Dynamical thermalization of Bose-Einstein condensate in Bunimovich stadium

Abstract

We study numerically the wavefunction evolution of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a Bunimovich stadium billiard being governed by the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We show that for a moderate nonlinearity, above a certain threshold, there is emergence of dynamical thermalization which leads to the Bose-Einstein probability distribution over the linear eigenmodes of the stadium. This distribution is drastically different from the energy equipartition over oscillator degrees of freedom which would lead to the ultra-violet catastrophe. We argue that this interesting phenomenon can be studied in cold atom experiments.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures. Accepted in Europhysics Letters. Video is available at http://www.quantware.ups-tlse.fr/QWLIB/becstadium