Atomic Bose-Einstein Condensation with Three-Body Interactions and Collective Excitations

Abstract

The stability of a Bose-Einstein condensed state of trapped ultra-cold atoms is investigated under the assumption of an attractive two-body and a repulsive three-body interaction. The Ginzburg-Pitaevskii-Gross (GPG) nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation is extended to include an effective potential dependent on the square of the density and solved numerically for the s-wave. The lowest frequency of the collective mode is determined and its dependences on the number of atoms and on the strength of the three-body force are studied. We show that the addition of three-body dynamics can allow the number of condensed atoms to increase considerably, even when the strength of the three-body force is very small compared with the strength of the two-body force. We also observe a first-order liquid-gas phase transition for the condensed state up to a critical strength of the effective three-body force.