Tracking quasi-classical chaos in ultracold boson gases

Abstract

We study the dynamics of a ultra-cold boson gas in a lattice submitted to a constant force. We track the route of the system towards chaos created by the many-body-induced nonlinearity and show that relevant information can be extracted from an experimentally accessible quantity, the gas mean position. The threshold nonlinearity for the appearance of chaotic behavior is deduced from KAM arguments and agrees with the value obtained by calculating the associated Lyapunov exponent.