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Excitation and damping of collective modes of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a one-dimensional lattice

O. Morsch, J. H. Müller, D. Ciampini, M. Cristiani, P. B. Blakie, C. J. Williams, P. S. Julienne, E. Arimondo

cond-mat.softarXiv:cond-mat/0208162

Abstract

The mode structure of a Bose-Einstein condensate non-adiabatically loaded into a one-dimensional optical lattice is studied by analyzing the visibility of the interference pattern as well as the radial profile of the condensate after a time-of-flight. A simple model is proposed that predicts the short-time decrease of the visibility as a function of the condensate parameters. In the radial direction, heavily damped oscillations are observed, as well as an increase in the condensate temperature. These findings are interpreted as a re-thermalization due to dissipation of the initial condensate excitations into high-lying modes.

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