Excitation and damping of collective modes of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a one-dimensional lattice

Morsch, O. and Müller, J. H. and Ciampini, D. and Cristiani, M. and Blakie, P. B. and Williams, C. J. and Julienne, P. S. and Arimondo, E. (2002) Excitation and damping of collective modes of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a one-dimensional lattice. Physical review. A, Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics, 67 . ISSN 1094-1622

Abstract

The mode structure of a Bose-Einstein condensate non-adiabatically loaded into a one-dimensional optical lattice is studied by analyzing the visibility of the interference pattern as well as the radial profile of the condensate after a time-of-flight. A simple model is proposed that predicts the short-time decrease of the visibility as a function of the condensate parameters. In the radial direction, heavily damped oscillations are observed, as well as an increase in the condensate temperature. These findings are interpreted as a re-thermalization due to dissipation of the initial condensate excitations into high-lying modes.

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