Hysteresis and metastability of Bose-Einstein condensed clouds of atoms confined in ring potentials

TL;DR

This paper investigates the hysteresis and metastability phenomena in Bose-Einstein condensates confined in ring potentials, analyzing critical rotation frequencies and stability using mean-field and many-body approaches.

Contribution

It introduces a combined mean-field and many-body analysis of hysteresis and metastability in ring-shaped Bose-Einstein condensates, including finite atom number effects.

Findings

Identification of critical frequencies for hysteresis

Determination of stability conditions for persistent currents

Comparison of mean-field and many-body results

Abstract

We consider a Bose-Einstein condensed cloud of atoms which rotate in a toroidal/annular potential. Assuming one-dimensional motion, we evaluate the critical frequencies associated with the effect of hysteresis and the critical coupling for stability of the persistent currents. We perform these calculations using both the mean-field approximation and the method of numerical diagonalization of the many-body Hamiltonian which includes corrections due to the finiteness of the atom number.