Microscopic dynamics in a strongly interacting Bose-Einstein condensate

An initially stable 85Rb Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) was subjected to a carefully controlled magnetic field pulse near a Feshbach resonance. This pulse probed the strongly interacting regime for the BEC, with the diluteness parameter (na(3)) ranging from 0.01 to 0.5. Condensate number loss resulted from the pulse, and for triangular pulses shorter than 1 ms, decreasing the pulse length actually increased the loss, until very short time scales (approximately 10 micros) were reached. The observed time dependence is very different from that expected in traditional inelastic loss processes, suggesting the presence of new microscopic BEC physics.