Three-body recombination in two coupled Bose–Einstein condensates

Abstract

We investigate the dynamics of two Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs) tunnel coupled by a double-well potential. In the case of attractive interatomic interaction, the effects of the three-body recombination losses and the feeding of the condensates from the thermal cloud are studied by using a two-mode approximation. It is shown that the stability region of the parameter space could be enlarged by increasing the three-body losses or the tunnelling coefficient. The numerical results also reveal some interesting motion characteristics of the BECs for different s-wave scattering lengths, including macroscopic quantum self-trapping of non-stationary state BECs, and periodic oscillation of the population whose phase orbit tends to a stable limit cycle.