The energy of the vacuum causes the Bosenova
From: http://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0412041 *The collapsing condensate was observed to lose atoms until the atom number reduced to about the critical value below which a stable condensate can exist. The dependence of the number of remaining atoms on time since initiation of the collapse _evolve was measured for the case of an initial state with Ninit = 16000 atoms and repulsive interaction corresponding to ainit = +7a0, where a0 is the hydrogen Bohr radius. * *The onset of number loss is quite sudden, with milliseconds of very little loss followed by a rapid decay of condensate population (within 0.5 ms) after which the condensate stabilizes again. This behavior results from the scaling of the loss rate with the cube of the density, the peak value of which rises as 1/(tcollapse − t) near the collapse point. * *This allows a precise definition of the collapse time tcollapse, the time after initiation of the collapse up to which only negligible numbers of atoms are lost from the condensate. Another quantitative result of the experiment is the dependence of tcollapse on the magnitude of the attractive interaction that causes the collapse, parametrised by the (negative) scattering length acollapse. These measurements are performed from an initial state with Ninit = 6000 atoms in an ideal gas state (with interaction between them tuned to zero). The tcollapse datapoints presented in the original paper have undergone one revision of their acollapse values by a factor of 1.166(8) due to a more precisely determined background scattering length. * * Although the main focus of this paper shall be on the collapse time, we mention two other striking features of the experiment: the appearance of ’bursts’ and ’jets’. One fraction of the atoms that are lost during the collapse is expelled from the condensate at quite high energies (∼100 nK to ∼400 nK, while the condensate temperature is 3 nK); this phenomenon was referred to as ’bursts’. Finally, when the collapse was interrupted during the period of number loss by a sudden jump in the scattering length, another atom ejection mechanism was observed: ’jets’ of atoms emerge, almost purely in the radial direction and with temperatures a lot lower than that of the bursts (a few nK)* My theory of the bosenova explosion When too many atoms are packed into too confined a space, the uncertainty principle comes into play. A confined space means an uncertain(aka high) kinetic energy. When confinement gets high enough, the associated increase in kinetic energy destabilizes the condensate and the condensate breaks down. When the condensate breaks down, the energy derived from the vacuum is carried off by high energy atoms in the form of jets and bursts as described above. When the condensate, reaches a size small enough to reduce the uncertainty in the condensate’s momentum, the condensate will reform with a lowered number of member atoms. Cheers: Axil
