Diffraction catastrophes threaded by quantized vortex skeletons caused by atom-optical aberrations induced in trapped Bose-Einstein condensates

Abstract

We propose a nonlinear atom-optics experiment to create diffraction catastrophes threaded by quantized vortex skeletons in Bose-Einstein condensed matter waves. We show how atom-optical aberrations induced in trapped Bose-Einstein condensates evolve into specific caustic structures due to imperfect focusing. Vortex skeletons, whose cross-sections are staggered vortex lattices, are observed to nucleate inside the universal diffraction catastrophes. Our observations shed further light on the structure and dynamics of Bose-novae and suggest applications of matter wave diffraction catastrophes, including detection of the order parameter pairing symmetry in cold gas experiments.

9 pages, 8 figures

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• A route to non-Abelian quantum turbulence in spinor Bose-Einstein condensates
• Caustics in quantum many-body dynamics
• Quantum caustics and the hierarchy of light cones in quenched spin chains
• Gravitational Caustics in an Atom Laser
• Propagation of fully-coherent and partially-coherent complex scalar fields in aberration space
• Caustics in the sine-Gordon model from quenches in coupled 1D Bose gases