Chaotic oscillation in an attractive Bose-Einstein condensate under an impulsive force

For an attractive trapped Bose-Einstein condensate an imaginary three-body recombination loss term and an imaginary linear source term are usually included in the Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) equation for a proper account of dynamics. Under the action of an impulsive force, generated by suddenly changing the atomic interaction or the trapping potential, the solution of this complex GP equation for attractive interaction is found to lead to a very long-term chaotic oscillation. © 2002 The American Physical Society.