The ground-state properties of Bose-Einstein condensates confined in anharmonic potentials at zero and finite temperatures


Elife Ö. Karabulut




Thursday, 10 November 2011, 13:30
Matfys library

Abstract:
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) trapped by potentials with different functional form than quadratic. Such trapping potentials lead to a variety of novel and fascinating effects on the properties of a BEC including the stability, vortex phases, etc. In the light of these advances, we investigate the stationary solutions of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation with attractive two-body and repulsive three-body interactions in the presence of an anharmonic trapping potential. The stability properties of the condensate are similar to those for a thermodynamic system in statistical physics which undergoes a first-order phase transition. We also investigate the finite temperature properties of a weakly interacting Bose gas trapped in a two-dimensional quartic potential. Our results indicate that the thermodynamic properties of the system vary significantly depending on the strength of interaction.