2006/01/12 by Bingbing Wang, Panming Fu, Jie Liu +1
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.other
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.74.063610
published as Phys. Rev. A 74, 063610 (2006) · 8 pages, 15 figures
arxiv created 2006/01/12 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
The self-trapping phenomenon of Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) in optical lattices is studied extensively by numerically solving the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. Our numerical results not only reproduce the phenomenon that was observed in a recent experiment [Anker \it et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. \bf 94 (2005)020403], but also find that the self-trapping breaks down at long evolution times, that is, the self-trapping in optical lattices is only temporary. The analysis of our numerical results shows that the self-trapping in optical lattices is related to the self-trapping of BECs in a double-well potential. A possible mechanism of the formation of steep edges in the wave packet evolution is explored in terms of the dynamics of relative phases between neighboring wells.