Creating solitonic excitations with controllable velocity in Bose-Einstein condensates

Published

May 20, 2020

Author(s)

Amilson R. Fritsch, Mingwu Lu, Alina M. Pineiro Escalera, Graham H. Reid, Ian Spielman

Abstract

Established techniques for deterministically creating dark solitons in repulsively interacting atomic Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) can only access a narrow range of soliton velocities. Because velocity a ects the stability of individual solitons and the properties of soliton-soliton interactions, this technical limitation has stymied experimental progress. Here we create dark solitons in highly anisotropic cigar-shaped BECs with arbitrary position and velocity by simultaneously engineering the amplitude and phase of the condensate wavefunction. This method improves on previous techniques which only manipulated the condensate phase. The single dark soliton solution present in true 1D systems corresponds to the kink soliton in anisotropic 3D systems, and is joined by a host of additional dark solitons including vortex ring and solitonic vortex solutions. We readily create dark solitons with speeds from zero to half the sound speed. The observed soliton oscillation frequency suggests that we imprinted solitonic vortices, which for our cigar-shaped system are the only stable solitons expected for these velocities. Our numerical simulations of 1D BECs show this technique to be equally e ective for creating kink solitons when they are stable. We demonstrate the utility of this technique by deterministically colliding dark solitons with domain walls in two- component spinor BECs.

Citation

Physical Review A

Pub Type

Journals

Keywords

Atomic Bose-Einstein Condensate, Soliton, phase imprinting

Citation

Fritsch, A. , Lu, M. , Pineiro Escalera, A. , Reid, G. and Spielman, I. (2020), Creating solitonic excitations with controllable velocity in Bose-Einstein condensates, Physical Review A (Accessed April 28, 2026)

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