Simulation method for evaporative cooling of trapped Bose gases at finite temperatures

Abstract

We develop a simulation method for evaporative cooling of trapped Bose-Einstein condensate at finite temperatures using Zaremba-Nikuni-Griffin (ZNG) formalism. ZNG formalism includes the generalized GP equation and a semiclassical kinetic equation for the thermal cloud, which treats the excitations semiclassically within the Hartree Fock approximation. The generalized GP equation includes the mean field due to the thermal cloud and the source term associated with collisions between the condensate and the thermal cloud. Our method is based on the numerical approach developed by Jackson and Zaremba, which simulates the kinetic equation using test particles. A key point of our method is to mimic the evaporative cooling process by eliminating the test particles with high energy. We show that our method successfully describes condensate growth during evaporative cooling. We also numerically simulate vortex lattice formation during evaporative cooling in the presence of the rotating thermal cloud.