Formation and decay of Bose-Einstein condensates in an excited band of a double-well optical lattice

Abstract

We study the formation and collision-aided decay of an ultra-cold atomic Bose-Einstein condensate in the first excited band of a double-well 2D-optical lattice with weak harmonic confinement in the perpendicular $z$ direction. This lattice geometry is based on an experiment by Wirth et al. The double well is asymmetric, with the local ground state in the shallow well nearly degenerate with the first excited state of the adjacent deep well. We compare the band structure obtained from a tight-binding (TB) model with that obtained numerically using a plane wave basis. We find the TB model to be in quantitative agreement for the lowest two bands, qualitative for next two bands, and inadequate for even higher bands. The band widths of the excited bands are much larger than the harmonic oscillator energy spacing in the $z$ direction. We then study the thermodynamics of a non-interacting Bose gas in the first excited band. We estimate the condensate fraction and critical temperature, $T_c$, as functions of lattice parameters. For typical atom numbers, the critical energy $k_BT_c$, with $k_B$ the Boltzmann constant, is larger than the excited band widths and harmonic oscillator energy. Using conservation of total energy and atom number, we show that the temperature increases after the lattice transformation. Finally, we estimate the time scale for a two-body collision-aided decay of the condensate as a function of lattice parameters. The decay involves two processes, the dominant one in which both colliding atoms decay to the ground band, and the second involving excitation of one atom to a higher band. For this estimate, we have used TB wave functions for the lowest four bands, and numerical estimates for higher bands. The decay rate rapidly increases with lattice depth, but stays smaller than the tunneling rate between the $s$ and $p$ orbitals in adjacent wells.