Flow of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a quasi-one-dimensional channel under the action of a piston

The problem of the flow of a Bose—Einstein condensate in a channel under the action of a piston is considered. Problems of this kind are topical in connection with experiments on condensate flow control in quasi-one-dimensional (cigar-shaped) traps, in wh ich the repulsive potential produced by a laser beam focused across the trap acts as a piston. A dispersive shock wave characterized by rapid oscillations of the condensate density and flow velocity is shown to be formed in the condensate flow after some instant of time for an arbitrary law of piston motion. The Whitham averaging method is used to obtain a solution for the main parameters of the dispersive shock wave in the case of a uniformly accelerated piston motion. The evolution of the dispersive shock wave immediately after the breaking time, when the dispersionless solution is well approximated by a cubic parabola for the coordinate dependence of the density, is analyzed in the case of an arbitrary piston motion. Comparison shows good agreement of the numerical calculation with the approximate analytical theory. The developed theory complements the previously considered case of a piston moving with a constant velocity and is important for describing the condensate transport in atomic chips.