Collapse of a Bose-Einstein condensate induced by fluctuations of the laser intensity

Abstract

The dynamics of a metastable attractive Bose-Einstein condensate trapped by a system of laser beams is analyzed in the presence of small fluctuations of the laser intensity. It is shown that the condensate will eventually collapse. The expected collapse time is inversely proportional to the integrated covariance of the time autocorrelation function of the laser intensity and it decays logarithmically with the number of atoms. Numerical simulations of the stochastic 3D Gross-Pitaevskii equation confirms analytical predictions for small and moderate values of mean field interaction.