Phase Dynamics of Self-Accelerating Bose-Einstein Condensates

Abstract:Self-accelerating Airy matter waves offer a clean setting to access the intrinsic cubic-in-time phase. Here we reconstruct the relative phase of simulated Airy-shaped Bose-Einstein condensates from interference fringes in free space, a regime approached in microgravity. The cubic phase dynamics are quantified via approximately debiased, windowed polynomial fits with systematics-aware uncertainty estimates that account for window-induced correlations. We compare two physically feasible phase-extraction methods, heterodyne-based and density-based, and show that an Airy-Gaussian geometry yields substantially improved robustness to fit-window selection relative to an Airy-Airy collision. In the weakly interacting regime, the extracted cubic coefficient responds linearly to leading order to the effective interaction strength, its shift from the noninteracting value providing a calibrated probe of weak mean-field nonlinearities in self-accelerating condensates.

Quantum Gases (cond-mat.quant-gas); Atomic Physics (physics.atom-ph); Computational Physics (physics.comp-ph); Quantum Physics (quant-ph)

arXiv:2602.01406 [cond-mat.quant-gas]

(or arXiv:2602.01406v2 [cond-mat.quant-gas] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.01406 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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