Nonlinear Phenomena in Complex Systems, 2006, Vol.9, No.3, pp.254-264

NONLINEAR PHENOMENA IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS
An Interdisciplinary Journal

2006, Vol.9, No.3, pp.254-264

From Many-Body Interaction to Nonlinearity.
Niklas Teichmann, Christoph Weiss, and Martin Holthaus

We introduce a model system which allows one to study the N-particle dynamics of an externally forced Bose-Einstein condensate at zero temperature numerically for reasonably large N, and gives rise to mean-field dynamics which can be either regular or chaotic. We illustrate by various examples the correspondence between the evolution of the N-particle system, governed by the linear many-body Schrödinger equation, and the mean-field dynamics described by the nonlinear Gross-Pitaevskii equation. This correspondence is strongly sensitive to whether or not the mean-field dynamics are chaotic.
Key words: Bose-Einstein condensates, mean-field approximation, regular and chaotic dynamics

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