Trapped bosons in mean field QED, nonlinear resonance cascades and dynamical BEC formation

Abstract

In this paper, we study a system of bosons trapped in a confining potential, interacting with a quantized field of coherent photons in the mean field description of non-relativistic Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) obtained by [N. Leopold and P. Pickl , 2017]. We derive the effective nonlinear cascade equations governing the emission and absorption of coherent photons by the boson subsystem in a combined weak-coupling and macroscopic time limit. We demonstrate that solutions to this nonlinear cascade describe a monotone decreasing energy flow in the boson subsystem. Thereby, we prove that a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) forms dynamically, under conservation of the total boson $L^2$ mass. We note that this process is crucially different from thermal relaxation to the ground state, and fundamentally depends on the nonlinear nature of the cascade dynamics.