Stuttgart 2012 – scientific programme

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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 34: Poster 1

Q 34.18: Poster

Tuesday, March 13, 2012, 16:30–19:00, Poster.I+II

General Relativistic Mean-Field Description of Bose-Einstein Condensates — •Oliver Gabel and Reinhold Walser — Institut für Angewandte Physik, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Hochschulstr. 4a, 64289 Darmstadt

Releasing Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) from traps is the standard way to observe the state of the system by time-of-flight measurements. This free fall is usually limited by the size of the vacuum chamber and is too short to study gravitational physics questions.

With the first realization of BECs in microgravity at the ZARM droptower in Bremen by the QUANTUS collaboration [1], it is now possible to perform free-fall experiments over large distances of 100 m and long times of 5–10 s. After the detailed non-relativistic modeling [2], it has become relevant to look into a general relativistic description of free-falling BECs and to quantify the arising relativistic corrections.

In this contribution, we present a fully covariant, general relativistic, mean-field description of an expanding Bose Einstein condensate, traveling along an arbitrary time-like worldline of a given background space-time metric.

[1] T. van Zoest et. Al., Bose-Einstein Condensation in Microgravity, Science, 328, 1540 (2010).

[2] G. Nandi, R. Walser, E. Kajari, and W. P. Schleich, Dropping cold quantum gases on Earth over long times and large distances, Phys. Rev. A 76, 63617 (2007).