Prethermal ripplons in quenched binary Bose-Einstein condensates
Abstract
Prethermal states--long-lived quasi-equilibrium configurations--occur in a wide range of physical systems that exhibit fast dephasing or reconfiguration followed by slow relaxation towards thermal equilibrium. We experimentally studied the 1D interface between immiscible 2D Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs); following a quench, the interfacial capillary waves (ripplons) quickly relaxed into a long-lived prethermal state characterized by a persistent non-equipartition of energy, evoking the classic Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou problem. We directly measured the interface's height profile as it evolved in time, identified the contribution of individual ripplon modes, and find that, though their individual amplitudes are thermally distributed, they are not in thermal equilibrium--high-momentum modes rapidly equilibrated with the bulk phonon modes of the 2D BEC, while lower momentum modes remained at elevated temperatures, forming a long-lived prethermal configuration for the whole system. We attribute this to kinematic isolation: the absence of energy- and momentum-conserving relaxation processes in our system at ultracold temperature.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{geng2026prethermal,
title = {{Prethermal ripplons in quenched binary Bose-Einstein condensates}},
author = {Yanda Geng and Stephen Eckel and Gretchen K. Campbell and Ian B. Spielman},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.09464},
eprint = {2609.09464},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09464},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Prethermal ripplons in quenched binary Bose-Einstein condensates
AU - Yanda Geng
AU - Stephen Eckel
AU - Gretchen K. Campbell
AU - Ian B. Spielman
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/08
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.09464
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09464
AB - Prethermal states--long-lived quasi-equilibrium configurations--occur in a wide range of physical systems that exhibit fast dephasing or reconfiguration followed by slow relaxation towards thermal equilibrium. We experimentally studied the 1D interface between immiscible 2D Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs); following a quench, the interfacial capillary waves (ripplons) quickly relaxed into a long-lived prethermal state characterized by a persistent non-equipartition of energy, evoking the classic Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou problem. We directly measured the interface's height profile as it evolved in time, identified the contribution of individual ripplon modes, and find that, though their individual amplitudes are thermally distributed, they are not in thermal equilibrium--high-momentum modes rapidly equilibrated with the bulk phonon modes of the 2D BEC, while lower momentum modes remained at elevated temperatures, forming a long-lived prethermal configuration for the whole system. We attribute this to kinematic isolation: the absence of energy- and momentum-conserving relaxation processes in our system at ultracold temperature.
ER -