Collective excitations of the hybrid atomic-molecular Bose-Einstein condensates

Abstract

We investigate the low-energy excitations of the spherically and axially trapped atomic Bose-Einstein condensate coupled to a molecular Bose gas by coherent Raman transitions. We apply the sum-rule approach of many-body response theory to derive the low-lying collective excitation frequencies of the hybrid atom-molecular system. The atomic and molecular ground-state densities obtained in Gross-Pitaevskii and modified Gross-Pitaevskii (including the higher order Lee-Huang-Yang term in interatomic interaction) approaches are used to find out the individual energy components and hence the excitation frequencies. We obtain different excitation energies for different angular momenta and study their characteristic dependence on the effective Raman detuning, the scattering length for atom-atom interaction, and the intensities of the coupling lasers. We show that the inclusion of the higher-order nonlinear interatomic interaction in modified Gross-Pitaevskii approach introduces significant corrections to the ground-state properties and the excitation frequencies both for axially and spherically trapped coupled $^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ condensate system with the increase in the $s$-wave scattering length (for peak gas-parameter $\ensuremath{\geqslant}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}3}$). It has been shown that the excitation frequencies decrease with the increase in the effective Raman detuning as well as the $s$-wave scattering length, whereas excitation frequencies increase with the increase in the atom-molecular coupling strength. The frequencies in modified Gross-Pitaevskii approximation exhibit an upward trend after a certain value of scattering length and also largely deviate from the Gross-Pitaevskii results with the increase in $s$-wave scattering length. The strong dependence of excitation frequencies on the laser intensities used for Raman transitions manifests the role of atom-molecular coupling strength on the control of collective excitations. The collective excitation frequencies for the hybrid atom-molecular BEC differ significantly from the excitation frequencies of a pure atomic BEC system when the atom-to-molecule conversion efficiency increases due to the decrease in the effective Raman detuning and increase in the atom-molecule coupling strength.