We study, both experimentally and theoretically, short-time modifications of the decay of excitations in a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) embedded in an optical lattice. Strong enhancement of the decay is observed compared to the Golden Rule results. This enhancement of decay increases with the lattice depth. It indicates that the description of decay modifications of few-body quantum systems also holds for decay of many-body excitations of a BEC.

In a Bose-Einstein condensate, the excitation of a Bogoliubov phonon with low momentum (e.g., by a two-photon Bragg process) is strongly suppressed due to destructive interference between two indistinguishable excitation pathways. Here we show that scattering of this sound excitation into a double-momentum mode is strongly enhanced due to constructive interference. This enhancement yields an inherent amplification of second-order sound excitations of the condensate, as we confirm experimentally. We further show that due to parity considerations, this effect is extended to higher-order excitations.

We show that atoms or molecules subject to fields that couple their internal and translational (momentum) states may undergo a crossover from randomization (diffusion) to strong localization (sharpening) of their momentum distribution. The predicted crossover should be manifest by a drastic change of the interference pattern as a function of the coupling fields.