Dispersive and classical shock waves in Bose-Einstein condensates and gas dynamics

By Mark A. Hoefer, Mark J. Ablowitz, Ian Coddington, E. A. Cornell, P. Engels, V. Schweikhard. 2006

257 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is a quantum fluid that gives rise to interesting shock-wave nonlinear dynamics. Experiments depict a BEC that exhibits behavior similar to that of a shock wave in a compressible gas, e.g., traveling fronts with steep gradients. However, the governing Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) equation that describes the mean field of a BEC admits no dissipation, hence classical dissipative shock solutions do not explain the phenomena. Instead, wave dynamics with small dispersion is considered and it is shown that this provides a mechanism for the generation of a dispersive shock wave (DSW). Computations with the GP equation are compared to experiment with excellent agreement. A comparison between a canonical one-dimensional (1D) dissipative and dispersive shock problem shows significant differences in shock structure and shock-front speed. Numerical results associated with the three-dimensional experiment show that three- and two-dimensional approximations are in excellent agreement and 1D approximations are in good qualitative agreement. Using 1D DSW theory, it is argued that the experimentally observed blast waves may be viewed as dispersive shock waves.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e8d1a3d57fcb8679e2eb79142d5bc54bb06ee5d2

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

Theory of ultracold atomic Fermi gases (2007, background): “…1999; Denschlag et al., 2000; Strecker et al., 2002; Khaykovich et al., 2002) and the observation of dispersive schock waves (Dutton et al., 2001; Hoefer et al., 2006); the transition to the Mott-insulator phase (Greiner et al., 2002), the observation of interaction effects in the Bloch…”
Dispersive shock waves and modulation theory (2016, methodology): “By moving a small, strongly repulsive dipole beam through a BEC, evidence for a critical velocity above which superfluidity breaks down was obtained [3,4].”