Excitation-assisted inelastic processes in trapped Bose-Einstein condensates - art. no. 013605

We find that inelastic collisional processes in Bose-Einstein condensates i nduce local variations of the mean-field interparticle interaction, and are accompanied by the creation and annihilation of elementary excitations. Th e physical picture is demonstrated for the case of three-body recombination in a trapped condensate. For a high trap barrier the production of high-en ergy trapped single-particle excitations results in a strong increase of th e loss rate of atoms from the condensate.