Paper detail

Strongly nonequilibrium Bose-condensed atomic systems

A trapped Bose-Einstein condensate, being strongly perturbed, exhibits several spatial structures. First, there appear quantum vortices. Increasing the amount of the injected energy leads to the formation of vortex tangles representing quantum vortex turbulence. Continuing energy injection makes the system so strongly perturbed that vortices become destroyed and there develops another kind of spatial structures with essentially heterogeneous spatial density. These structures consist of high-density droplets, or grains, surrounded by the regions of low density. The droplets are randomly distributed in space, where they can move; however they live sufficiently long time to be treated as a type of metastable creatures. Such structures have been observed in nonequilibrium trapped Bose gases of $^{87}$Rb subject to the action of an oscillatory perturbation modulating the trapping potential. Perturbing the system even stronger transforms the droplet structure into wave turbulence, where Bose condensate is destroyed. Numerical simulations are in good agreement with experimental observations.