Collisional relaxation in diffuse clouds of trapped bosons
arXiv:cond-mat/9910081 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.61.053603
Abstract
The damping of collective modes and the relaxation of temperature anisotropies in a trapped Bose gas is determined at temperatures above the Bose-Einstein condensation temperature in the collisionless regime. We demonstrate for both cases how the effects of collisions may be treated perturbatively and calculate relaxation rates based on a variational principle. Our results are compared with experiment and with previous theoretical calculations.
13 pages, revtex, 4 postscript figures