Controlling chaos in a weakly coupled array of Bose-Einstein condensates

Abstract

The spatial structure of a Bose-Einstein condensate loaded into an optical lattice potential is investigated and the spatially chaotic distributions of the condensates are revealed under the tight-binding approximation. Adding a laser pulse on a proper site of the lattice and treating it as a control signal, control of the chaos in the system is carried out by using the Ott-Grebogi-Yorker scheme. For an appropriate laser pulse, we can suppress the chaos and push the system onto a stable manifold of a target orbit. After the control, a regular distribution, which may be expected in experiments or practical applications, of the condensates in the coordinate space is obtained.