Growth-Collapse Cycles of a Bose-Einstein Condensate with Attractive Interactions

A Bose-Einstein condensate of atoms with attractive interactions exhibits growth and collapse cycles, when it is fed by a thermal cloud. Recently this phenomenon has been directly observed in a trapped Li-7 gas. We offer a quantitative explanation of the data, on the basis of a model proposed earlier. It is shown that the condensate wave function acquires a chaotic component after the first collapse, indicating superfluid turbulence.