Accidental suppression of landau damping of the transverse breathing mode in elongated bose-einstein condensates.
We study transverse radial oscillations of an elongated Bose-Einstein condensate using finite-temperature simulations, in the context of a recent experiment at ENS [F. Chevy, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 250402 (2002)]]. The mode observed experimentally corresponds to an in-phase collective oscillation of both the condensate and the thermal cloud. Our simulations are in excellent agreement with experiment, accounting for the very small damping rates observed. In contrast to other condensate modes, interatomic collisions are found to be the dominant damping mechanism in this case.