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Observation of 1/k^{4}-Tails after Expansion of Bose-Einstein Condensates with Impurities
Hugo Cayla1, Pietro Massignan2, Thierry Giamarchi3
1Université Paris-Saclay, Institut d'Optique Graduate School, CNRS, Laboratoire Charles Fabry, 91127, Palaiseau, France.
Abstract:
We measure the momentum density in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with dilute spin impurities after an expansion in the presence of interactions. We observe tails decaying as 1/k^{4} at large momentum k in the condensate and in the impurity cloud. These algebraic tails originate from the impurity-BEC interaction, but their amplitudes greatly exceed those expected from two-body contact interactions at equilibrium in the trap. Furthermore, in the absence of impurities, such algebraic tails are not found in the BEC density measured after the interaction-driven expansion. These results highlight the key role played by impurities when present, a possibility that had not been considered in our previous work [Chang et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 235303 (2016)PRLTAO0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.117.235303]. Our measurements suggest that these unexpected algebraic tails originate from the nontrivial dynamics of the expansion in the presence of impurity-bath interactions.
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