Excitation-assisted inelastic processes in trapped Bose-Einstein condensates

TL;DR

This paper investigates how inelastic collisions in trapped Bose-Einstein condensates cause local interaction changes and excitation creation, notably showing that three-body recombination can significantly increase atom loss through high-energy excitations.

Contribution

It introduces a physical model linking inelastic collisional processes to local mean-field variations and excitation dynamics in trapped condensates.

Findings

Inelastic collisions induce local mean-field variations.

Three-body recombination leads to high-energy excitations.

High trap barriers increase atom loss due to excitations.

Abstract

We find that inelastic collisional processes in Bose-Einstein condensates induce local variations of the mean-field interparticle interaction and are accompanied by the creation/annihilation of elementary excitation. The physical picture is demonstrated for the case of three body recombination in a trapped condensate. For a high trap barrier the production of high energy trapped single particle excitations results in a strong increase of the loss rate of atoms from the condensate.