Instabilities of Bloch Waves of Bose-Einstein Condensates

Preprint
Publisher Website
Google Scholar
  • 29 September 2000
Abstract
The stability of Bloch waves of Bose-Einstein condensates in the lowest band of an optical lattice is studied. Because of the repulsive interactions between the atoms, Bloch waves in the middle region of the Brillouin zone are local energy minima and represent superflows, the rest are saddle points some of which can become dynamically unstable. Such dynamical instability is not present for BEC plane waves in free space, and has real experimental consequences including the breakdown of the Bloch oscillations.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: