Damping of macroscopic oscillation and interference pattern in coupled Gross-Pitaevskii equations without self-interaction

Abstract

Quantum phenomena appear in a macroscopic scale in Bose-Einstein condensates. The Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) equation describes the dynamics of the weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensates. The GP equation has a form of the Schroedinger equation with self-interaction. The coupled Gross-Pitaevskii equations are used to describe some mixtures of Bose-Einstein condensates. In this paper, we will show some numerical results of coupled Gross-Pitaevskii equations without self-interaction, which has a form of nonlinearly-coupled Schroedinger equations. We demonstrate that the macroscopic oscillation and the interference of two quantum wave packets decay in time owing to mutual interaction, which is analogous to the decoherence in quantum mechanics of many particles.