Delayed collapses of Bose-Einstein condensates in relation to anti-de Sitter gravity

We numerically investigate spherically symmetric collapses in the Gross-Pitaevskii equation with attractive nonlinearity in a harmonic potential. Even below threshold for direct collapse, the wave function bounces off from the origin and may eventually become singular after a number of oscillations in the trapping potential. This is reminiscent of the evolution of Einstein gravity sourced by a scalar field in anti de Sitter space where collapse corresponds to black-hole formation. We carefully examine the long time evolution of the wave function for continuous families of initial states in order to sharpen out this qualitative coincidence which may bring new insights in both directions. On the one hand, we comment on possible implications for the so-called Bosenova collapses in cold atom Bose-Einstein condensates. On the other hand, Gross-Pitaevskii provides a toy model to study the relevance of either the resonance conditions or the nonlinearity for the problem of anti de Sitter instability.