Dipole dynamics of an interacting bosonic mixture

Abstract

We unravel the coupled dipole dynamics of a two-species Bose-Einstein condensate with tunable interspecies interaction. We produce a degenerate mixture of K41-Rb87 in an optical trap and we study the dipole oscillations of both atomic species in the linear response regime. Varying the interspecies interaction from the weakly to the strongly attractive side, we measure the frequencies and the composition of the two dipole eigenmodes. For sufficiently strong interactions, even beyond the mean-field collapse, we find that the frequency of the low-energy eigenmode is determined only by the bare trap frequencies and the species population imbalance. The experimental results are well reproduced by numerical simulations based on two coupled Gross-Pitaevskii equations. Our findings provide a detailed picture of the dipole excitations in asymmetric bosonic mixtures.