Collective oscillations in trapped Bose-Einstein-condensed gases in the presence of weak disorder

Abstract

The influence of a weak random potential on the collective modes of a trapped interacting Bose-Einstein condensate at zero temperature is calculated in the limit when the correlation length of the disorder is smaller than the healing length of the superfluid. The problem is solved in the Thomas-Fermi limit by generalizing the superfluid hydrodynamic equations to allow for the presence of weak disorder. We find that the disorder-induced frequency shifts of the low-energy excitations can be of the same order of magnitude as the beyond mean-field corrections in the normal interaction recently observed experimentally.