Tidal disruption of a Bose-Einstein condensate*

Bose-Einstein condensates are a highly flexible tool for the investigation of complex fluid flow dynamics. Generating coherent streams, exploiting interferometric imaging, manipulating flow with shaped potentials and performing fluid-flow tracing by exploiting internal states are just few examples of the rich manipulation schemes available for these systems.  

 

While in our previous work, a dilute atom laser, generated by a quasi-continuous outcoupling of atoms from a trapped BEC, was shown to form sharply delineated caustics when encountering attractive or repulsive barriers, here we investigate the opposite limit of a high-density, slowly drifting cloud released from a trap in a single pulse. When the cloud is made to slowly drift past an attractive potential, flow dynamics loosely resembling tidal disruption events known from astrophysical contexts are observed. Even in the classical limit, such dynamics can exhibit surprising effects. For example, an attractive Gaussian potential can lead to peculiar trapping orbits. Atoms approaching orbital motion are indeed observed in our experiments. Accompanying numerical studies elucidate this behavior.    

 

The current status and future directions of this type of work will be discussed.