Spatial chaos of trapped Bose-Einstein condensate in one-dimensional weak optical lattice potential

The spatially chaotic attractor in an elongated cloud of Bose-Einstein condensed atoms perturbed by a weak optical lattice potential is studied. The analytical insolvability and numerical incomputability of the atomic number density are revealed by a perturbed solution that illustrates the unpredictability of the deterministic chaos. Although this could lead the nonphysical explosion and unboundedness to the numerical solution, the theoretical analysis offers a criterion to avoid them. Moreover, the velocity field is investigated that exhibits the superfluid property of the chaotic system. (C) 2004 American Institute of Physics.