Abstract
The damping of collective modes and the relaxation of temperature anisotropies in a trapped Bose gas is determined at temperatures above the Bose-Einstein condensation temperature in the collisionless regime. We demonstrate for both cases how the effects of collisions may be treated perturbatively and calculate relaxation rates from a variational principle. Our results are compared with experiment and with previous theoretical calculations.
- Received 6 October 1999
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.61.053603
©2000 American Physical Society
