Self-interfering matter-wave patterns generated by a moving laser obstacle in a two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate inside a power trap cut off by box potential boundaries

We report the observation of highly energetic self-interfering matter-wave (SIMW) patterns generated by a moving obstacle in a two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) inside a power trap cut off by hard-wall box potential boundaries. The obstacle initially excites circular dispersive waves radiating away from the center of the trap which are reflected from hard-wall box boundaries at the edges of the trap. The resulting interference between outgoing waves from the center of the trap and reflected waves from the box boundaries institutes, to the best of our knowledge, unprecedented SIMW patterns. For this purpose we simulated the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation using the split-step Crank-Nicolson method and the obstacle was modelled by a moving impenetrable Gaussian potential barrier. Various trapping geometries are considered in which the dynamics of the spatial and momentum density, as well as the energy, are considered. The momentum dynamics reveal an oscillatory behavior for the condensate fraction, indicative of excitations out of and de-excitations back into the condensate state. An oscillatory pattern for the energy dynamics reveals the presence of solitons in the system. Some vortex features are also obtained.