Atom laser dynamics

Abstract

An ideal atom laser would produce an atomic beam with highly stable flux and energy. In practice the stability is likely to be limited by technical noise and nonlinear dynamical effects. We investigate the dynamics of an atom laser using a comprehensive one dimensional, mean-field numerical model. We fully model the output beam and experimentally important physics such as three-body recombination. We find that at high pump rates the latter plays a role in suppressing the high frequency dynamics, which would otherwise limit the stability of the output beam.