Quench induced collective excitations: from breathing to acoustic modes

TL;DR

This paper investigates how interaction quenches in 2D Bose-Einstein condensates induce collective excitations, revealing deviations from scale invariance and analyzing trap effects on acoustic modes, with implications for experimental spectroscopy.

Contribution

It provides a combined numerical and analytical study of collective modes post-quench, highlighting scale invariance breakdown and trap effects in 2D BECs.

Findings

Collective excitations follow hydrodynamic theory instead of conformal predictions at low energies.

Trap effects significantly influence acoustic oscillations at high energies.

The analysis offers experimentally accessible insights into many-body state spectroscopy.

Abstract

In trapped Bose-Einstein condensates, interaction quenches which are abrupt changes of the interaction strength typically implemented via Feshbach tuning, are a practical and widely used protocol to address far-from-equilibrium collective modes. Using both numerical Gross Pitaevskii and analytical schemes we study these interaction-quench-induced collective modes in a harmonically trapped two-dimensional Bose--Einstein condensate contrasting the behavior found at low and high energies. In the low-lying regime, we characterize realistic circumstances in which there is a breakdown of the expected scale invariance so that the collective excitations follow hydrodynamic theory instead of the predictions given by SO(2,1) conformal symmetry. In the high energy regime, we focus on important trap effects associated with acoustic oscillations which have been of interest experimentally. This comprehensive analysis of the collective excitations in trapped two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensates is experimentally accessible. Through their frequencies and damping, this reflects an important built-in spectroscopy of such many-body states.