Non-exponential one-body loss in a Bose-Einstein condensate

Abstract

We have studied the decay of a Bose-Einstein condensate of metastable helium atoms in an optical dipole trap. In the regime where two- and three-body losses can be neglected we show that the Bose-Einstein condensate and the thermal cloud show fundamentally different decay characteristics. The total number of atoms decays exponentially with time constant tau; however, the thermal cloud decays exponentially with time constant (4/3)tau and the condensate decays much faster, and non-exponentially. We show that this behaviour, which should be present for all BECs in thermal equilibrium with a considerable thermal fraction, is due to a transfer of atoms from the condensate to the thermal cloud during its decay.

The intuitive explanation of the atomic transfer effect has been corrected

References in corpus (3)

• Three-body recombination at large scattering lengths in an ultracold atomic gas
• Frequency metrology in quantum degenerate helium: Direct measurement of the 2 3S1 - 2 1S0 transition
• Magnetic-field dependent trap loss of ultracold metastable helium

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Efimov States of Heavy Impurities in a Bose-Einstein Condensate
• Many-Body Open Quantum Systems
• Fermi-Bose mixture in mixed dimensions
• Effects of atom losses on a one-dimensional lattice gas of hardcore bosons
• Mesoscopic quantum superposition states of weakly-coupled matter-wave solitons
• Asymmetric many-body loss in a bosonic double well
• Ensemble master equation for a trapped-atom clock with one- and two-body losses