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Abstract. The aim of the present review is to introduce the reader to some of the physical notions and of the mathematical methods that are relevant to the study of nonlinear waves in Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs). Upon introducing the general framework, we discuss the prototypical models that are relevant to this setting for different dimensions and different potentials confining the atoms. We analyze some of the model properties and explore their typical wave solutions (plane wave solutions, bright, dark, gap solitons, as well as vortices). We then offer a collection of mathematical methods that can be used to understand the existence, stability and dynamics of nonlinear waves in such BECs, either directly or starting from different types of limits (e.g., the linear or the nonlinear limit, or the discrete limit of the corresponding equation). Finally, we consider some special topics involving more recent developments, and experimental setups in which there is still considerable need for developing mathematical as well as computational tools.PACS numbers: 03.75. Kk, 03.75.Lm, 05.45 • EP: Ermakov-Pinney (Equation)• GP: Gross-Pitaevskii (Equation)• KdV: Korteweg-de Vries (Equation)• LS: Lyapunov-Schmidt (Technique)• MT: Magnetic Trap• NLS: Nonlinear Schrödinger (Equation)• NPSE: Non-polynomial Schrödinger Equation IntroductionThe phenomenon of Bose-Einstein condensation is a quantum phase transition originally predicted by Bose [1] and Einstein [2,3] in 1924. In particular, it was shown that below a critical transition temperature T c , a finite fraction of particles of a boson gas (i.e., whose particles obey the Bose statistics) condenses into the same quantum state, known as the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). Although BoseEinstein condensation is known to be a fundamental phenomenon, connected, e.g., to superfluidity in liquid helium and superconductivity in metals (see, e.g., Ref.[4]), BECs were experimentally realized 70 years after their theoretical prediction: this major achievement took place in 1995, when different species of dilute alkali vapors confined in a magnetic trap (MT) were cooled down to extremely low temperatures [5][6][7], and has already been recognized through the 2001 Nobel prize in Physics [8,9]. This first unambiguous manifestation of a macroscopic quantum state in a manybody system sparked an explosion of activity, as reflected by the publication of several thousand papers related to BECs since then. Nowadays there exist more than fifty experimental BEC groups around the world, while an enormous amount of theoretical work has followed and driven the experimental efforts, with an impressive impact on many branches of Physics.From a theoretical standpoint, and for experimentally relevant conditions, the static and dynamical properties of a BEC can be described by means of an effective mean-field equation known as the Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) equation [10,11]. This is a variant of the famous nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) equation [12] (incorporating an external potential used to confine th...

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We revisit a classic study [D. S. Hall, Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 1539 (1998)10.1103/PhysRevLett.81.1539] of interpenetrating Bose-Einstein condensates in the hyperfine states |F=1,m{f}=-1 identical with |1 and |F=2,m{f}=+1 identical with |2 of 87Rb and observe striking new nonequilibrium component separation dynamics in the form of oscillating ringlike structures. The process of component separation is not significantly damped, a finding that also contrasts sharply with earlier experimental work, allowing a clean first look at a collective excitation of a binary superfluid. We further demonstrate extraordinary quantitative agreement between theoretical and experimental results using a multicomponent mean-field model with key additional features: the inclusion of atomic losses and the careful characterization of trap potentials (at the level of a fraction of a percent).

We study the dynamics of small vortex clusters with few (2-4) co-rotating vortices in Bose-Einstein condensates by means of experiments, numerical computations, and theoretical analysis. All of these approaches corroborate the counter-intuitive presence of a dynamical instability of symmetric vortex configurations. The instability arises as a pitchfork bifurcation at sufficiently large values of the angular momentum that induces the emergence and stabilization of asymmetric rotating vortex configurations. The latter are quantified in the theoretical model and observed in the experiments. The dynamics is explored both for the integrable two-vortex system, where a reduction of the phase space of the system provides valuable insight, as well as for the non-integrable three-(or more) vortex case, which additionally admits the possibility of chaotic trajectories.