Three-body recombination of ultracold Bose gases using the truncated Wigner method

We apply the truncated Wigner method to the process of three-body recombination in ultracold Bose gases. We find that within the validity regime of the Wigner truncation for two-body scattering, three-body recombination can be treated using a set of coupled stochastic differential equations that include diffusion terms, and can be simulated using known numerical methods. As an example we investigate the behavior of a simple homogeneous Bose gas, finding a very slight increase of the loss rate compared to that obtained by using the standard method.

Figure 1

Total particle numbers for the sample trajectories of the system described in the text. Main plot shows the populations for (higher and lower solid lines) $v_{\mathrm{cut}}=\{44.3,59.1\}\mathrm{mm}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}$, together with the results for the simple model (dashed line). The inset shows the population for the trajectory with $v_{\mathrm{cut}}=44.3\mathrm{mm}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}$ over a subset of the total time.