Exploding Condensates

School of Physics, University of Melbourne

3:30pm Friday 13^th May, Seminar Room AR103, Graduate Research Centre

We show that for relatively high density dilute gas Bose-Einstein condensates undergoing reflection many excitations can be formed in the condensate, causing in some cases a significant disruption in the internal structure of the atom cloud. In particular we show that this phenomena occurs for Bragg reflection of dilute gas Bose-Einstein condensate in an optical lattice and for normal and quantum reflection of condensates off surfaces. In each case we relate theoretical results to experiments.

Finally, we show that this phenomena is related to the formation of a standing wave between the incident and reflected condensates, through the observation that the same behavior can be observed for two colliding condensates.

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