Formation of molecules in an expanding Bose-Einstein condensate

A mean field theory of expanding hybrid atom-molecule Bose-Einstein condensates is applied to the recent MPI experiments on ${}^{87}$Rb that demonstrated the formation of ultracold molecules due to Feshbach resonance. The subsequent dissociation of the molecules is treated using a non-mean-field parametric approximation. The latter method is also used in determining optimal conditions for the formation of molecular BEC