Chaos in coupled atom–molecular Bose–Einstein condensates

Abstract

Abstract We investigate the chaotic dynamics of a coupled three-level atom–molecular Bose–Einstein condensate system composed by one molecular mode and two atomic modes. With the increase of atom–molecular coupling strength, we reveal the emergence of chaotic oscillations of the relative population difference between two atomic modes, which can be proven by the broad windows with a huge number of frequencies in spectral density and the chaotic trajectories in phase space diagrams. The different effects of initial states on atomic population oscillations are revealed, where for more particles in the initial state of the molecular model, chaos appears in the larger parameter region of system dynamics. Furthermore, we find that strong intermolecular interaction strength can suppress chaos resulting from strong atom–molecule coupling. This is due to the difficult transformation between atomic and molecular modes, as well as the relatively independent dynamic evolution of atoms and molecules.