Dephasing of Bose-Einstein condensates

Abstract

We discuss some recent work on the dephasing of Bose-Einstein condensates of interacting atoms due to fluctuations in the chemical potential μ. At vanishing temperature such fluctuations are due to the uncertainty of the number of particles in the condensate caused by the depletion effect. The dephasing is in this case a non-diffusive (and in principle reversible) effect called ‘collapse’ (and ‘revival’). Above a certain cross-over temperature the dephasing proceeds mainly via a diffusive process which follows in time a short and ineffective phase collapse. The phase-diffusion constant is dominated by the temperature dependent condensate-number fluctuations caused by the scattering of low-energy excitations off the condensate. We also discuss the (in general subdominant) contribution of the occupation-number fluctuations in quasi-particle states in the thermal cloud. For simplicity we discuss here results for a box-like trapping potential.