Superfluidity in a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate with an oscillating barrier

Project level: Honours, Summer

Floquet theory finds solutions to Hamiltonian systems that are periodic in time.  They are easy to find via diagnonalisation for linear systems, but have only recently begun to be studied for nonlinear systems such as BECs.  This project aims to find nonlinear Floquet states for a BEC in the presence of an oscillating potential, and interpret their properties from the perspective of superfluidity in the system.  This is relevant to experiments that have been performed with BECs to measure the superfluid critical velocity.