Abstract
We study the quench of a degenerate ultracold Bose gas to the unitary regime, where interactions are as strong as allowed by quantum mechanics. We lay the foundation of a cumulant theory able to simultaneously capture the three-body Efimov effect and ergodic evolution. After an initial period of rapid quantum depletion, a universal prethermal stage is established, characterized by a kinetic temperature and an emergent Bogoliubov dispersion law, while the microscopic degrees of freedom remain far from equilibrium. Integrability is then broken by higher-order interaction terms in the many-body Hamiltonian, leading to a momentum-dependent departure from power law to decaying exponential behavior of the occupation numbers at large momentum. We also find signatures of the Efimov effect in the many-body dynamics and make a precise identification between the observed beating phenomenon and the binding energy of an Efimov trimer. Throughout the paper, our predictions for a uniform gas are quantitatively compared with experimental results for quenched unitary Bose gases in uniform potentials.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 063314 |
Number of pages | 29 |
Journal | Physical Review A |
Volume | 102 |
Issue number | 6 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 11 Dec 2020 |