Weak wave turbulence as a precursor to universal coarsening in a homogeneous Bose gas

Abstract

Relaxation and condensation of an isolated low-energy Bose gas provide an ideal setting for the study of the universal features of far-from-equilibrium many-body dynamics and the emergence of long-range order. Conceptually, the emergence of such order involves two steps: the formation of local coherence, on a system-specific microscopic lengthscale, and the spreading of coherence, over lengthscales much larger than any microscopic scale. The latter is understood in terms of universal phase-ordering kinetics, or coarsening, characterized by an algebraic growth of the coherence length. Here, for a homogeneous Bose gas with tunable interactions, we show that the former also has a universal description, within the framework of weak wave turbulence (WWT). Specifically, the initial transport of particles to low momenta corresponds to an inverse turbulent cascade that is, in agreement with the WWT theory, characterized by a power-law momentum distribution, with exponent $\gamma = 2.4(1)$, and transport times ${\propto} (na)^{-2}$, where $n$ is the gas density and $a$ the $s$-wave scattering length.