Tue March 18, 2014 4:00 pm
Demise of a Unitary Bose Gas
Location:Harvard Jefferson-250
A gaseous Bose-Einstein condensate composed of atoms with a modest scattering length is the poster child for many-body mean-field theory. In such a case the theory completely and accurately describes a host of phenomena in the gas. At very large scattering length however, mean-field theory likely proves inadequate to its description. This situation was until recently regard as moot, since a large-scattering length (unitary) BEC should quickly collapse due to three-body recombination. Remarkably, a bold recent experiment has shown that while the demise of the gas is indeed rapid, it nevertheless has time to exhibit nontrivial, nonequilibrium behavior. This talk approaches the behavior of such a gas from several points of view, taking the first steps at describing theoretically the final acts of the disintegrating condensate.