Nonlinear Effects for Bose Einstein Condensates in Optical Lattices

Cold atoms and, more recently, Bose-Einstein condensates （BEC＇s） in optical lattices have attracted increasing interest since their first realization. In particular, the formal similarity between the wavefunction of a BEC inside the periodic potential of an optical lattice and of the electrons in a crystal lattice has triggered theoretical and experimental efforts alike. Many phenomena from condensed matter physics, such as Bloch oscillations and Landau-Zener tunneling have been shown to be observable also in optical lattices. An important difference between electrons in a crystal lattice and a BEC inside the periodic potential of an optical lattice is the strength of the self interaction and hence the magnitude of the nonlinearity of the system. Electrons in a metal are almost noninteracting, whereas atoms inside a BEC interact strongly. A＇ perturbation approach is appropriate in the former case while in the latter the full nonlinearity must be taken into account. From this feature new physics is expected. Most experiments to date have been carried out in the regime of shallow lattice depth, for which the system is well described by the mean field Gross-Pitaevskii equation with a periodic potential. Moreover, the nonlinearity induced by the mean-field of the condensate has been shown, both theoretically and experimentally, to give rise to instabilities in certain regions of the Brillouin zone. These instabilities are not present in the corresponding linear system, i.e. the electron system. Experimental and theoretical results on the subject of nonlinear Landau-Zener tunneling and nonlinearity-induced instabilities in a Bose-Einstein condensate interacting with an external periodic potential will be presented.

Nonlinear Effects for Bose Einstein Condensates in Optical Lattices