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Phys. Rev. A 54, 661 - 664 (1996)

Role of attractive interactions on Bose-Einstein condensation

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R. J. Dodd, Mark Edwards, C. J. Williams, and C. W. Clark
Physics Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Technology Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce, Gaithersburg, Maryland 20899

M. J. Holland
JILA and Department of Physics, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0440

P. A. Ruprecht and K. Burnett
Clarendon Laboratory, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PU, United Kingdom

Received 22 February 1996

The properties and stability of a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate are strongly influenced by attractive interactions between the particles. We describe the spatial distribution, stability, and collisional loss rates for a weakly interacting gas in the mean-field limit. We show how the condensate contracts and becomes unstable as the number of condensate atoms increases. We further show how the number of atoms is limited by the collisional loss rates associated with the contraction of the condensate; this loss is in addition to the particle ejection decay indentified by Kagan et al. © 1996 The American Physical Society.


©1996 The American Physical Society

URL: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevA.54.661
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.54.661
PACS: 03.75.Fi, 05.30.Jp, 31.70.Hq, 34.50.Pi

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