Formation and propagation of matter-wave soliton trains

By K. Strecker, G. Partridge, A. Truscott, R. Hulet. Nature, 2002

1,363 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Attraction between the atoms of a Bose–Einstein condensate renders it unstable to collapse, although a condensate with a limited number of atoms can be stabilized by confinement in an atom trap. However, beyond this number the condensate collapses. Condensates constrained to one-dimensional motion with attractive interactions are predicted to form stable solitons, in which the attractive forces exactly compensate for wave-packet dispersion. Here we report the formation of bright solitons of 7Li atoms in a quasi-one-dimensional optical trap, by magnetically tuning the interactions in a stable Bose–Einstein condensate from repulsive to attractive. The solitons are set in motion by offsetting the optical potential, and are observed to propagate in the potential for many oscillatory cycles without spreading. We observe a soliton train, containing many solitons; repulsive interactions between neighbouring solitons are inferred from their motion.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d926d74b8b74f8f0b01b0b064af2c93387edd6fe

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Boris A. Malomed
2. C. Chin
3. R. Grimm
4. E. Tiesinga
5. G. Partridge
6. K. Strecker
7. A. Truscott
8. Wei Pang

Citations in the corpus

• Two-dimensional vortex quantum droplets (2018, background): “The analysis predicts stable quantum droplets (QDs) of an ultradilute superfluid, while traditional solitons in BEC were created as quantum-gas clouds [24–30].”
• Fermi gases in one dimension: From Bethe ansatz to experiments (2013, background): “In this regime, due to the intrinsic nonlinearity from s-wave scattering between atoms, matter-wave solitons have been observed in several experiments (Becker et al., 2008; Khaykovich et al., 2002; Stellmer et al., 2008; Strecker et al., 2002).”
• Theory of ultracold atomic Fermi gases (2007, background): “…et al., 2005); the realization of spinor condensates (Stenger et al., 1998); the propagation of solitons (Burger et al., 1999; Denschlag et al., 2000; Strecker et al., 2002; Khaykovich et al., 2002) and the observation of dispersive schock waves (Dutton et al., 2001; Hoefer et al., 2006); the…”
• Bright matter wave solitons in Bose–Einstein condensates (2003, methodology): “The number of observed solitons varies from shot to shot due to fluctuations in the initial number of atoms and a slow loss of signal with time (reprinted from [15]).”
• Oscillations and interactions of dark and dark bright solitons in Bose Einstein condensates (2008, background): “Bright solitons, characterized as non-spreading matter-wave packets, have been observed in BEC with attractive interaction [9, 10, 11] where they represent the ground state of the system.”