BEC Collapse, Particle Production and Squeezing of the Vacuum

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Phenomena associated with the controlled collapse of a Bose-Einstein condensate described in the experiment of Donley et al (E. Donley et. al., Nature 412, 295 (2001); N. Claussen, Ph. D. Thesis, U. of Colorado (2003)) are explained here as a consequence of the squeezing and amplification of quantum fluctuations above the condensate by the condensate dynamics. In analyzing the changing amplitude and particle contents of these excitations, our simple physical picture provides excellent quantitative fits with experimental data on the scaling behavior of the collapse time and the amount of particles emitted in the jets.