Loading of a Bose-Einstein condensate into an optical lattice: The excitation of collective modes

The dynamics of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a harmonic trap with a nonadiabatically loaded optical lattice is studied analytically. As the global effect of the optical potential can be described in terms of a renormalized interaction coupling constant and of an effective mass in the laser direction, a fast loading can be understood as a sudden change of those characteristic parameters. In this approach, a standard scaling transformation is applied to study the resulting dynamics, in particular, the generation of collective modes. The relevance of the excited modes to the interference patterns obtained after free expansion is analyzed. The applicability of trap-frequency adjustments as a strategy for suppressing the loading induced excitations is discussed.