Effect of optical disorder and single defects on the expansion of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a one-dimensional waveguide

TL;DR

This paper studies how optical disorder and single defects affect the expansion of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a one-dimensional waveguide, revealing that speckle-induced disorder significantly inhibits expansion, supported by experiments and numerical simulations.

Contribution

It provides a detailed experimental and numerical analysis of the impact of optical speckles and single defects on condensate expansion in 1D waveguides, highlighting disorder effects.

Findings

Speckle disorder strongly inhibits condensate expansion.

Single optical defects influence the expansion dynamics.

Experimental results agree with Gross-Pitaevskii simulations.

Abstract

We investigate the one-dimensional expansion of a Bose-Einstein condensate in an optical guide in the presence of a random potential created with optical speckles. With the speckle the expansion of the condensate is strongly inhibited. A detailed investigation has been carried out varying the experimental conditions and checking the expansion when a single optical defect is present. The experimental results are in good agreement with numerical calculations based on the Gross-Pitaevskii equation.