Accidental suppression of Landau damping of the transverse breathing mode in elongated Bose-Einstein condensates

Abstract

We study transverse radial oscillations of an elongated Bose-Einstein condensate using finite temperature simulations, in the context of a recent experiment at ENS. We demonstrate the existence of a mode corresponding to an in-phase collective oscillation of both the condensate and thermal cloud. Excitation of this mode accounts for the very small damping rate observed experimentally, and we find excellent quantitative agreement between experiment and theory. In contrast to other condensate modes, interatomic collisions are found to be the dominant damping mechanism in this case.