Trapped Bose-Einstein Condensed Gas with Two and Three-Atom Interactions

Abstract

The stability of a Bose-Einstein condensed state of trapped ultra-cold atoms is investigated under the assumption of an attractive two-body and a repulsive three-body interaction. The Ginzburg-Pitaevskii-Gross (GPG) nonlinear Schrödinger equation is extended to include an effective potential dependent on the square of the density and solved numerically for the $s-$wave. The lowest frequency of the collective mode is determined through the Fourier transform of the time dependent solution and its dependences on the number of atoms and the strength of the three-body force are studied. We show that the addition of three-body dynamics can allow the number of condensed atoms to increase considerably, even when the strength of the three-body force is very small compared with the strength of the two-body force.

Contribution to the "Internationl Workshop on Collective Excitations in Fermi and Bose Systems", Serra Negra, Brazil, September 14-17, 1998. To be published by World Scientific, Singapore