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.