Phase Dynamics of Self-Accelerating Bose-Einstein Condensates

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a method to reconstruct and analyze the cubic phase dynamics of self-accelerating Bose-Einstein condensates, providing a new way to probe weak nonlinearities in microgravity-like conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a phase-extraction approach for Airy-shaped Bose-Einstein condensates, comparing methods and showing robustness improvements, enabling practical probing of nonlinearities.

Findings

Cubic phase dynamics are reconstructed from interference fringes.

The density-based method is more robust than heterodyne-based.

Cubic coefficient varies linearly with interaction strength.

Abstract

Self-accelerating Airy matter waves offer a clean setting to access the cubic Kennard phase. Here we reconstruct the relative phase of simulated Airy-shaped Bose-Einstein condensates in free space, a regime approached in microgravity, from interference fringes. The cubic phase dynamics are quantified via windowed polynomial fits with systematics-aware uncertainty estimates that account for window-induced correlations. We compare two experimentally feasible phase-extraction methods - heterodyne-based and density-based - and show that an Airy-Gaussian geometry yields substantially improved robustness to fit-window selection relative to an Airy-Airy collision. In the weakly interacting regime, the extracted cubic coefficient responds linearly to the effective one-dimensional interaction strength. Our approach turns cubic phase dynamics into a practical probe of weak mean-field nonlinearities in self-accelerating condensates.