Relaxation processes in clouds of trapped bosons above the Bose-Einstein condensation temperature

We present a unified account of damping of low-lying collective modes and of relaxation of temperature anisotropies in a trapped Bose gas in the collisionless regime. By means of variational techniques, we show that the relaxation times for the two situations are closely related to the simplest variational estimate of the viscous relaxation time. We derive rather precise theoretical expressions for the characteristic relaxation times and compare our results with experiment. [S0031-9007(98)07598-X].