Strong confinement and oscillations in two-component Bose-Einstein condensates

Summary form only given. Recent elegant experimental observations of Rabi-type oscillations in a two-component Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of 87Rb brings up an issue of collapse and revival in BEC which has resisted any conventional theoretical analysis. Though a heuristic argument using "twists" of an SU(2) order parameter was given in, the fundamental dynamics of the observed oscillations has not been understood. In this talk, we present a resolution to this problem in terms a new model of BEC dynamics. We go beyond revival analysis to present a new quantum mechanical picture of the multicomponent BEC physics based on a strong confinement model, which explains experimentally observed features quite well. We show that the coupled Gross-Pitaevski (GP) equations for the two-component Bose-Einstein condensate can be decoupled by a time-dependent dressing transformation.