Splitting and merging an elongated Bose-Einstein condensate at finite temperature

Abstract

We analyze coherence effects during the splitting of a quasi one-dimensional condensate into two spatially separated ones and their subsequent merging into a single condensate. Our analysis takes into account finite-temperature effects, where phase fluctuations play an important role. We show that, at zero-temperature, the two split condensates can be merged into a single one with a negligible phase difference. By increasing temperature to a finite value below the critical point for condensation ($T_c$), i.e., $0\le T/T_c<1$, a considerable enhancement of phase and density fluctuations appears during the process of splitting and merging. Our results show that if the process of splitting and merging is sufficiently adiabatic, the whole process is quite insensitive to phase fluctuations and even at high temperatures, a single condensate can be produced.

8 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Observation of Bose-Einstein Condensation of Molecules
• Interference of an array of independent Bose-Einstein condensates
• Probing the classical field approximation - thermodynamics and decaying vortices
• Adiabatic and non-adiabatic merging of independent Bose condensates

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• Breaking the resilience of a two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate to fragmentation
• Non-Markovian dynamics in atom-laser outcoupling from a double-well Bose-Einstein condensate
• Josephson effect and quantum merging of two Bose superfluids
• Role of the relative phase in the merging of two independent Bose-Einstein condensates
• Dynamic instabilities and turbulence of merged rotating Bose-Einstein condensates