Dynamic fragmentation of a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate

Abstract

We investigate dynamical behavior of fragmentation of a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate in both the semiclassical and quantum regimes. We show that an unfragmented condensate can become fragmented at later times due to the inherent interactions of elastic atomic collisions, when a certain phase relationship exists among the state amplitudes in different components initially. A close relationship between the fragmentation and population dynamics of atomic distributions within different spin components is found for certain initial states with zero magnetization. The type of fragmentation regime is characterized via atom-number fluctuations. We also address complications of our study when the condensate spatial mode function is different for each spin component. © 2003 The American Physical Society.