• Accepted Paper

Phase dynamics of self-accelerating Bose-Einstein condensates

Maximilian L. D. D. Pellner and Georgi Gary Rozenman

Phys. Rev. Research - Accepted 8 November, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/zg1p-nwf8

Abstract

Self-accelerating Airy matter waves offer a clean setting to access the intrinsic cubic-in-time phase. Here we reconstruct the relative phase of simulated Airy-shaped Bose–Einstein condensates from interference fringes in free space, a regime approached in microgravity. The cubic phase dynamics are quantified via approximately debiased, windowed polynomial fits with systematics-aware uncertainty estimates that account for window-induced correlations. We compare two physically feasible phase-extraction methods – heterodyne-based and density-based – and show that an Airy-Gaussian geometry yields substantially improved robustness to fit-window selection relative to an Airy-Airy collision. In the weakly interacting regime, the extracted cubic coefficient responds linearly to leading order to the effective interaction strength, its shift from the noninteracting value providing a calibrated probe of weak mean-field nonlinearities in self-accelerating condensates

Export citation

Export citation

Choose format for download:

Download Citation

If the author has provided any supplemental materials with this article they will be available upon publication of the version of record.

Sign In to Your Journals Account

Filter

Filter

Article Lookup

Enter a citation