We study the effect of a logarithmic nonlinearity in the Schrödinger equation (SE) on the dynamics of a freely expanding Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). The logarithmic nonlinearity was one of the first proposed nonlinear extensions to the SE which emphasized the conservation of important physical properties of the linear theory, e.g.: the separability of noninteracting states. Using this separability, we incorporate it into the description of a BEC obeying a logarithmic Gross-Pittaevskii equation. We investigate the dynamics of such BECs using variational and numerical methods and find that, using experimental techniques like delta kick collimation, experiments with extended freefall times as available on microgravity platforms could be able to lower the bound on the strength of the logarithmic nonlinearity by at least one order of magnitude.
We investigate the effect of the Continuous Spontaneous Localization (CSL) model on light-pulse atom interferometry. Using a path-integral approach with an additional stochastic potential accounting for CSL, we derive an exponential loss of the contrast that scales linearly with the interferometer time T if both interferometer arms are spatially separated. We compare our theoretical results with measurements from a cold rubidium atom interferometer based on counter-propagating two-photon transitions with pulse separation times up to T = 260 ms and obtain the corresponding bounds on the CSL parameters.
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