Droplet formation in a Bose-Einstein condensate with strong dipole-dipole interaction

TL;DR

This paper investigates droplet formation and crystalline structures in a dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate of dysprosium atoms, emphasizing the role of three-body interactions and providing numerical predictions aligned with recent experiments.

Contribution

It introduces the first numerical prediction of three-body interaction values in a dysprosium BEC and explores droplet stability and formation mechanisms.

Findings

Droplet patterns and crystalline structures form in the condensate.

Three-body interactions significantly influence droplet formation.

Droplets remain stable during time-of-flight expansion.

Abstract

Motivated by the recent experiment [H. Kadau \textit{et al.}, arXiv:1508.05007 (2015)], we study roton instability and droplet formation in a Bose-Einstein condensate of $^{164}$Dy atoms with strong magnetic dipole-dipole interaction. We numerically solve the cubic-quintic Gross-Pitaevskii equation with dipole-dipole interaction, and show that the three-body interaction plays a significant role in the formation of droplet patterns. We numerically demonstrate the formation of droplet patterns and crystalline structures, decay of droplets, and hysteresis behavior, which are in good agreement with the experiment. Our numerical simulations provide the first prediction on the values of the three-body interaction in a $^{164}$Dy Bose-Einstein condensate. We also predict that the droplets remain stable during the time-of-flight expansion. From our results, further experiments investigating the three-body interaction in dipolar quantum gases are required.