Dynamics and density correlations in matter-wave jet emission of a driven condensate

Abstract

Emission of matter wave jets has been recently observed in a Bose-Einstein condensate confined by a cylindrical box potential, induced by a periodically modulated inter-particle interaction (Nature {\bf 551}, 356 (2017)). In this paper we apply the time-dependent Bogoliubov theory to study the quantum dynamics and the correlation effects observed in this highly non-equilibrium phenomenon. Without any fitting parameter, our theoretical calculations on the number of ejected atoms and the angular density correlations are in excellent quantitative agreement with the experimental measurements. The exponential growth in time of the ejected atoms can be understood in terms of a dynamical instability associated with the modulation of the interaction. We interpret the angular density correlation of the jets as the Hanbury-Brown-Twiss effect between the excited quasi-particles with different angular momenta, and our theory explains the puzzling observation of the asymmetric density correlations between the jets with the same and opposite momenta. Our theory can also identify the main factors that control the height and width of the peaks in the density correlation function, which can be directly verified in future experiments.