Modulational Instability of Dipolar Bose–Einstein Condensates in Optical Lattices with Three-Body Interactions

Motivated by the recent experiment [Nature 530 (2016) 194] in which a stable droplet in a dipolar quantum gas has been created by the interaction-induced instability, we focus on the modulation instability of an optically-trapped dipolar Bose–Einstein condensate with three-body interaction. Within the mean-field level, we analytically solve the discrete cubic-quintic Gross–Pitaevskii equation with dipole–dipole interaction loaded into a deep optical lattice and show how combined effects of the three-body interaction and dipole–dipole interaction on the condition of modulational instability. Our results show that the interplay of the three-body interaction and dipole–dipole interaction can dramatically change the modulation instability condition compared with the ordinary Gross–Pitaevskii equation. We believe that the predicted results in this work can be useful for the future possible experiment of loading a Bose–Einstein condensate of ¹⁶⁴ Dy atoms with strong magnetic dipole–dipole interaction into an optical lattice. (paper)