Microscopic Treatment of Binary Interactions in the Non-Equilibrium Dynamics of Partially Bose-condensed Trapped Gases

TL;DR

This paper derives a microscopic nonlinear Schrödinger equation for trapped Bose gases, incorporating binary interactions and excited state effects, extending the conventional Gross-Pitaevskii framework to more accurately describe non-equilibrium dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a microscopic derivation of a nonlinear Schrödinger equation that includes repeated binary interactions and excited state effects, improving upon the Gross-Pitaevskii equation.

Findings

Derived a nonlinear Schrödinger equation with binary interactions

Connected the equation to the many-body T-matrix in a trap

Highlighted the limitations of the conventional Gross-Pitaevskii equation

Abstract

In this paper we use microscopic arguments to derive a nonlinear Schr\"{o}dinger equation for trapped Bose-condensed gases. This is made possible by considering the equations of motion of various anomalous averages. The resulting equation explicitly includes the effect of repeated binary interactions (in particular ladders) between the atoms. Moreover, under the conditions that dressing of the intermediate states of a collision can be ignored, this equation is shown to reduce to the conventional Gross-Pitaevskii equation in the pseudopotential limit. Extending the treatment, we show first how the occupation of excited (bare particle) states affects the collisions, and thus obtain the many-body T-matrix approximation in a trap. In addition, we discuss how the bare particle many-body T-matrix gets dressed by mean fields due to condensed and excited atoms. We conclude that the most commonly used version of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation can only be put on a microscopic basis for a restrictive range of conditions. For partial condensation, we need to take account of interactions between condensed and excited atoms, which, in a consistent formulation, should also be expressed in terms of the many-body T-matrix. This can be achieved by considering fluctuations around the condensate mean field beyond those included in the conventional finite temperature mean field, i.e. Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB), theory.