Phase Dynamics of Self-Accelerating Bose-Einstein Condensates

Abstract: Self-accelerating Airy matter waves offer a clean setting to access the cubic Kennard phase. Here we reconstruct the relative phase of simulated Airy-shaped Bose-Einstein condensates in free space, a regime approached in microgravity, from interference fringes. The cubic phase dynamics are quantified via windowed polynomial fits with systematics-aware uncertainty estimates that account for window-induced correlations. We compare two experimentally feasible phase-extraction methods - heterodyne-based and density-based - and show that an Airy-Gaussian geometry yields substantially improved robustness to fit-window selection relative to an Airy-Airy collision. In the weakly interacting regime, the extracted cubic coefficient responds linearly to the effective one-dimensional interaction strength. Our approach turns cubic phase dynamics into a practical probe of weak mean-field nonlinearities in self-accelerating condensates.