Soliton and phonon production by an oscillating obstacle in a quasi-one-dimensional trapped repulsive Bose-Einstein condensate

Abstract

We use the one-dimensional (1D) Gross-Pitaevskii equation to investigate the dynamical evolution of a dilute repulsive Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) confined in an elongated static nonharmonic trap and stirred by an oscillating Gaussian obstacle moving at uniform speed in alternate direction. Direct numerical solutions of this equation show that above a critical obstacle velocity, the motion of the obstacle creates gray solitons and phonons. At first, when the velocity of the obstacle increases, the dissipation also increases. But the dissipation reaches a maximal value and then decreases dramatically and vanishes at high obstacle velocities. Our results at low obstacle velocities are similar to those previously obtained experimentally and by simulations in the case of vortice and phonon production in 3D and 2D trapped repulsive BEC's. But at high obstacle velocities, we show that the quasi-1D trapped repulsive BEC behaves as a quasisuperfluid medium with disappearance of gray soliton and phonon excitations. This extends previous results and provides the main dependence of the phenomenon on the obstacle characteristics.