Collective excitations of BEC under anharmonic trap position jittering

Abstract

Collective excitations of a Bose-Einstein condensate under periodic oscillations of a quadratic plus quartic trap position has been studied. A coupled set of variational equations is derived for the width and the condensate wave function center. Analytical expressions for the growth of oscillation amplitudes in the resonance case are derived. It is shown that jittering of an anharmonic trap position can cause double resonance of the BEC width and the center of mass oscillation in the wide range of the BEC parameters values. The predictions of variational approach are confirmed by full numerical simulations of the 1D GP equation.