Nonlocal interactions in collapsing condensates in a box

Abstract: The collapse of attractive Bose-Einstein condensates in a box with tunable interatomic interactions was studied experimentally recently. Not only were remarkably stable remnant condensates observed, but furthermore they often seem to involve two stable plateaus. We suggest that these plateaus correspond in fact to two minima of the energy, the attractive atomic interactions being nonlocal. We show in detail that all the experimental data for these remnant condensates can be accounted for by minimising a variational energy involving a nonlocal interatomic potential that is attractive everywhere and that has a range of the order of the magnetic length.