We numerically study the classical and quantum dynamics of an atomic bright soliton in a highly-elongated one-dimensional harmonic trap with a Gaussian barrier. In the regime of the recent experiment by Dyke {\it et al.}, the system realizes a coherent nonlinear soliton beam-splitter and interferometer whose accuracy we analyze. In the case of tighter radial trap confinement and enhanced quantum fluctuations, a split soliton can represent a spin-squeezed, or alternatively, a fragmented condensate with reduced phase-coherence that can be measured by interfering the split soliton by the barrier. We also find large quantum mechanical uncertainties in the soliton's position and momentum due to nonlinear interaction with the barrier.
Bright solitons in atomic Bose--Einstein condensates are strong candidates for high precision matter-wave interferometry, as their inherent stability against dispersion supports long interrogation times. An analog to a beam splitter is then a narrow potential barrier. A very narrow barrier is desirable for interferometric purposes, but in a typical realisation using a blue-detuned optical dipole potential, the width is limited by the laser wavelength. We investigate a soliton interferometry scheme using the geometric scalar potential experienced by atoms in a spatially dependent dark state to …
The properties of nonlinear interference pattern between atomic bright solitons are characterized analytically, with the aid of exact solutions of dynamical equation in mean-field approximation. It is shown that relative velocity, relative phase, and nonlinear interaction strength can be measured from the interference pattern. The nonlinear interference properties are proposed to design atomic soliton interferometry in Bose-Einstein condensate. As an example, we apply them to measure gravity acceleration in a ultra-cold atom systems with a high precision degree. The results are also meaningful…
There has been considerable recent interest in matterwave interferometry with bright solitons in quantum gases with attractive interactions, for applications such as rotation sensing. We model the quantum dynamics of these systems and find that the attractive interactions required for the presence of bright solitons causes quantum phase-diffusion, which severely impairs the sensitivity. We propose a scheme that partially restores the sensitivity, but find that in the case of rotation sensing, it is still better to work in a regime with minimal interactions if possible.
We use an effective one-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation to study bright matter-wave solitons held in a tightly confining toroidal trapping potential, in a rotating frame of reference, as they are split and recombined on narrow barrier potentials. In particular, we present an analytical and numerical analysis of the phase evolution of the solitons and delimit a velocity regime in which soliton Sagnac interferometry is possible, taking account of the effect of quantum uncertainty.
We study bright solitons in the Gross-Pitaevskii equation as they are split and recombined in a low energy system. We present new analytic results determining the general region in which a soliton may not be split on a potential barrier, and confirm these results numerically. Furthermore, we analyse the energetic regimes where quantum fluctuations in the initial center of mass position and momentum become influential on the outcome of soliton splitting and recombination events. We then use the results of this analysis to determine a parameter regime where soliton interferometry is practicable.
We revisit the proposal of Castin and Weiss [Phys. Rev. Lett. vol. 102, 010403 (2009)] for using the scattering of a quantum matter-wave soliton on a barrier in order to create a coherent superposition state of the soliton being entirely to the left of the barrier and being entirely to the right of the barrier. In that proposal, is was assumed that the scattering is perfectly elastic, i.e. that the center-of-mass kinetic energy of the soliton is lower than the chemical potential of the soliton. Here we relax this assumption. Also, we introduce an interferometric scheme, which uses interference…
We study the statics and dynamics of anisotropic, stable, bright and dark-in-bright dipolar quasi-two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) solitons on a one-dimensional (1D) optical-lattice (OL) potential. These solitons mobile in a plane perpendicular to the 1D OL trap can have both repulsive and attractive contact interactions. The dark-in-bright solitons are the excited states of the bright solitons. The solitons, when subject to a small perturbation, exhibit sustained breathing oscillation. The dark-in-bright solitons can be created by phase imprinting a bright soliton. At medium vel…
We model the dynamics of attractively interacting ultracold bosonic atoms in a quasi-one-dimensional wave-guide with additional harmonic trapping. Initially, we prepare the system in its ground state and then shift the zero of the harmonic trap and switch on an additional narrow scattering potential near the center of the trap. After colliding with the barrier twice, we propose to measure the number of atoms opposite to the initial condition. Quantum-enhanced interferometry with quantum bright solitons allows us to predict detection of an offset of the scattering potential with considerably in…
We demonstrate that spatially inhomogeneous defocusing nonlinear landscapes with the nonlinearity coefficient growing toward the periphery as [1+abs(r)]**a support one- and two-dimensional fundamental and higher-order bright solitons, as well as vortex solitons, with algebraically decaying tails. The energy flow of the solitons converges as long as nonlinearity growth rate exceeds the dimensionality, i.e., a>D. Fundamental solitons are always stable, while multipoles and vortices are stable if the nonlinearity growth rate is large enough.
We report that defocusing cubic media with spatially inhomogeneous nonlinearity, whose strength increases rapidly enough toward the periphery, can support stable bright localized modes. Such nonlinearity landscapes give rise to a variety of stable solitons in all three dimensions, including 1D fundamental and multihump states, 2D vortex solitons with arbitrarily high topological charges, and fundamental solitons in 3D. Solitons maintain their coherence in the state of motion, oscillating in the nonlinear potential as robust quasi-particles and colliding elastically. In addition to numerically …
The existence, stability, and dynamics of bound pairs of symbiotic matter waves in the form of dark-bright soliton pairs in two-component mixtures of atomic Bose-Einstein condensates is investigated. Motivated by the tunability of the atomic interactions in recent experiments, we explore in detail the impact that changes in the interaction strengths have on these bound pairs by considering significant deviations from the Manakov (integrable) limit. It is found that dark-bright soliton pairs exist as stable configurations in a wide parametric window spanning both the miscible and the immiscible…
We show that bimodal systems with a spatially nonuniform defocusing cubic nonlinearity, whose strength grows toward the periphery, can support stable two-component solitons. For a sufficiently strong XPM interaction, vector solitons with overlapping components become unstable, while stable families of solitons with spatially separated components emerge. Stable complexes with separated components may be composed not only of fundamental solitons, but of multipoles too.
We study dark-bright ring solitons in two-component Bose-Einstein condensates. In the limit of large densities of the dark component, we describe the soliton dynamics by means of an equation of motion for the ring radius. The presence of the bright, "filling" species is demonstrated to have a stabilizing effect on the ring dark soliton. Near the linear limit, we discuss the symmetry-breaking bifurcations of dark-bright soliton stripes and vortex-bright soliton clusters from the dark-bright ring and relate the stabilizing effect of filling to changes in the bifurcation diagram. Finally, we show…
We demonstrate robust, stable, mobile, quasi-one-dimensional, dark-in-bright dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) soliton with a notch in the central plane formed due to dipolar interaction for repulsive contact interaction. At medium velocity the head on collision of two such solitons is found to be quasi elastic with practically no deformation. A proposal for creating dipolar dark-in-bright solitons in laboratories by phase imprinting is also discussed. A rich variety of such solitons can be formed in dipolar binary BEC, where one can have a dark-in-bright soliton coupled to a bright solit…
When an interaction quench by a factor of four is applied to an attractive Bose-Einstein condensate, a higher-order quantum bright soliton exhibiting robust oscillations is predicted in the semiclassical limit by the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. Combining matrix-product state simulations of the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian with analytical treatment via the Lieb-Liniger model and the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis, we show these oscillations are absent. Instead, one obtains a large stationary soliton core with a small thermal cloud, a smoking-gun signal for non-semiclassical behavior on macrosc…
The dynamics of dark-bright solitons beyond the mean-field approximation is investigated. We first examine the case of a single dark-bright soliton and its oscillations within a parabolic trap. Subsequently, we move to the setting of collisions, comparing the mean-field approximation to that involving multiple orbitals in both the dark and the bright component. Fragmentation is present and significantly affects the dynamics, especially in the case of slower solitons and in that of lower atom numbers. It is shown that the presence of fragmentation allows for bipartite entanglement between the d…
We present experimental results and a systematic theoretical analysis of dark-br ight soliton interactions and multiple-dark-bright soliton complexes in atomic t wo-component Bose-Einstein condensates. We study analytically the interactions b etween two-dark-bright solitons in a homogeneous condensate and, then, extend ou r considerations to the presence of the trap. An effective equation of motion is derived for the dark-bright soliton center and the existence and stability of stationary two-dark-bright soliton states is illustrated (with the bright components being either in- or out-of-phase…
We demonstrate stable and metastable vortex-bright solitons in a three-dimensional spin-orbit-coupled three-component hyperfine spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) using numerical solution and variational approximation of a mean-field model. The spin-orbit coupling provides attraction to form vortex-bright solitons in both attractive and repulsive spinor BECs. The ground state of these vortex-bright solitons is axially symmetric for weak polar interaction. For a sufficiently strong ferromagnetic interaction, we observe the emergence of a fully asymmetric vortex-bright soliton as the ground s…
We show how access to sufficiently flexible trapping potentials could be exploited in the generation of three-dimensional atomic bright matter-wave solitons. Our proposal provides a route towards producing bright solitonic states with good fidelity, in contrast to, for example, a non-adiabatic sweeping of an applied magnetic field through a Feshbach resonance.
We study the dynamics of dark-bright solitons in binary mixtures of Bose gases at finite temperature using a system of two coupled dissipative Gross-Pitaevskii equations. We develop a perturbation theory for the two-component system to derive an equation of motion for the soliton centers and identify different temperature-dependent damping regimes. We show that the effect of the bright ("filling") soliton component is to partially stabilize "bare" dark solitons against temperature-induced dissipation, thus providing longer lifetimes. We also study analytically thermal effects on dark-bright so…
In this work we present a systematic theoretical analysis regarding dark-bright solitons and their interactions, motivated by recent advances in atomic two-component repulsively interacting Bose-Einstein condensates. In particular, we study analytically via a two-soliton ansatz adopted within a variational formulation the interaction between two dark-bright solitons in a homogeneous environment beyond the integrable regime, by considering general inter/intra-atomic interaction coefficients. We retrieve the possibility of a fixed point in the case where the bright solitons are out of phase. As …
We investigate linear interference effects between a nonlinear plane wave and bright solitons, which are admitted by pair-transition coupled two-component Bose-Einstein condensate. We demonstrate the interference effects can induce several localized waves possessing distinctive wave structures, mainly including anti-dark soliton, W-shaped soliton, multi-peak soliton, Kuznetsov-Ma like breather, and multi-peak breather. Especially, the explicit conditions for them are clarified by a phase diagram based on the linear interference properties. Furthermore, the interactions between these localized …
Two-dimensional (2D) fundamental soliton-soliton pairs are investigated in binary mixtures of Bose-Einstein condensates with attractive interactions between atoms of the same type. Both attractive and repulsive interactions between atoms of different type are considered. The general properties of the stationary states are investigated variationally and numerically, and the stability regions of the soliton-soliton pairs are determined.
By numerical and variational analysis of the three-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation we study the formation and dynamics of bright and vortex-bright solitons in a cigar-shaped dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate for large repulsive atomic interactions. Phase diagram showing the region of stability of the solitons is obtained. We also study the dynamics of breathing oscillation of the solitons as well as the collision dynamics of two solitons at large velocities. Two solitons placed side-by-side at rest coalesce to form a stable bound soliton molecule due to dipolar attraction.
The emergence of vortex-bright soliton dipoles in two-component Bose-Einstein condensates through bifurcations from suitable eigenstates of the underlying linear system is examined. These dipoles can have their bright solitary structures be in phase (symmetric) or out of phase (anti-symmetric). The dynamical robustness of each of these two possibilities is considered and the out-of-phase case is found to exhibit an intriguing symmetry-breaking instability that can in turn lead to tunneling of the bright wavefunction between the two vortex "wells". We interpret this phenomenon by virtue of a vo…
We study the dynamical properties of bright-bright solitons in two species Bose-Einstein condensates with the repulsive interspecies interactions under the external harmonic potentials by using a variational approach combined with numerical simulation. It is found that the interactions between bright-bright solitons vary from repulsive to attractive interactions with the increasing of their separating distances. And the bright-bright solitons can be localized at equilibrium positions, different from the periodic oscillation of bright soliton in the single species condensates. Especially, a thr…
A study of bright matter-wave solitons of a cesium Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is presented. Production of a single soliton is demonstrated and dependence of soliton atom number on the interatomic interaction is investigated. Formation of soliton trains in the quasi one-dimensional confinement is shown. Additionally, fragmentation of a BEC has been observed outside confinement, in free space. In the end a double BEC production setup for studying soliton collisions is described.
A vortex-bright soliton can precess around a fix point. Here, we find numerically that the fixed point and the associated precessional orbits can be shifted by applying a constant driving force on the bright component, the displacement is proportional to the force with a minus sign. This robust dynamics is then discussed theoretically by treating the vortex-bright soliton as an effective point particle, explaining the observed dynamics and predicting new ones that are subsequently confirmed. By appropriately tuning the force, the vortex-bright soliton can be guided following an arbitrary traje…
We study matter-wave bright solitons in spin-orbit (SO) coupled Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) with attractive interatomic interactions. We use a multiscale expansion method to identify solution families for chemical potentials in the semi-infinite gap of the linear energy spectrum. Depending on the linear and spin-orbit coupling strengths, the solitons may resemble either standard bright nonlinear Schrödinger solitons or exhibit a modulated density profile, reminiscent of the stripe phase of SO-coupled repulsive BECs. Our numerical results are in excellent agreement with our analytical find…
We demonstrate robust, stable, mobile two-dimensional (2D) dipolar ring-dark-in-bright (RDB) Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) solitons for repulsive contact interaction, subject to a harmonic trap along the $y$ direction perpendicular to the polarization direction $z$. Such a RDB soliton has a ring-shaped notch (zero in density) imprinted on a 2D bright soliton free to move in the $x-z$ plane. At medium velocity the head-on collision of two such solitons is found to be quasi elastic with practically no deformation. The possibility of creating the RDB soliton by phase imprinting is demonstrated. …
The statics, stability and dynamical properties of dark-bright soliton pairs are investigated motivated by applications in a homogeneous system of two-component repulsively interacting Bose-Einstein condensate. One of the intra-species interaction coefficients is used as the relevant parameter controlling the deviation from the integrable Manakov limit. Two different families of stationary states are identified consisting of dark-bright solitons that are either antisymmetric (out-of-phase) or asymmetric (mass imbalanced) with respect to their bright soliton. Both of the above dark-bright confi…
We explore the stability and dynamics of dark-bright solitons in two-component elongated Bose-Einstein condensates by developing effective 1D vector equations as well as solving the corresponding 3D Gross-Pitaevskii equations. A strong dependence of the oscillation frequency and of the stability of the dark-bright (DB) soliton on the atom number of its components is found. Spontaneous symmetry breaking leads to oscillatory dynamics in the transverse degrees of freedom for a large occupation of the component supporting the dark soliton. Moreover, the interactions of two DB solitons are investig…
We study bright solitons in a Bose-Einstein condensate with a spin-orbit coupling that has been realized experimentally. Both stationary bright solitons and moving bright solitons are found. The stationary bright solitons are the ground states and possess well-defined spin-parity, a symmetry involving both spatial and spin degrees of freedom; these solitons are real valued but not positive definite, and the number of their nodes depends on the strength of spin-orbit coupling. For the moving bright solitons, their shapes are found to change with velocity due to the lack of Galilean invariance i…
We study the formation of bright solitons in the impurity component of Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC)-impurity mixture by using the time-dependent Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov theory. While we assume the boson-boson and impurity-boson interactions to be effectively repulsive, their character can be changed spontaneously from repulsive to attractive in the presence of strong anomalous correlations. In such a regime the impurity component becomes a system of effectively attractive atoms leading automatically to the generation of bright solitons. We find that this soliton decays at higher temperatures…
Adopting a mean-field Gross-Pitaevskii description for a spinor polariton Bose-Einstein condensates under non-resonant pumping, we investigate the static and dynamical properties of dark-bright solitons. We derive analytically the equation of motion for the center of mass of the dark-bright soliton center, using the Hamiltonian approach. The resulting equation captures how the combination of the open-dissipative character and the spin degrees of freedom of a polariton Bose-Einstein condensate affects the properties of a dark-bright soliton, i.e. the dark-bright soliton relaxes by blending with…
We introduce an effectively one-dimensional (1D) model of a bosonic gas of particles carrying collinear dipole moments which are induced by an external polarizing field with the strength periodically modulated along the coordinate, which gives rise to an effective nonlocal nonlinear lattice in the condensate. The existence, shape and stability of bright solitons, appearing in this model, are investigated by means of the variational approximation and numerical methods. The mobility of solitons and interactions between them are studied too.
We analyze a possibility of macroscopic quantum effects in the form of coupled structural oscillations and shuttle motion of bright two-component spin-orbit-coupled striped (one-dimensional, 1D) and semi-vortex (two-dimensional, 2D) matter-wave solitons, under the action of linear mixing (Rabi coupling) between the components. In 1D, the intrinsic oscillations manifest themselves as flippings between spatially even and odd components of striped solitons, while in 2D the system features periodic transitions between zero-vorticity and vortical components of semi-vortex solitons. The consideratio…
We demonstrate fast control of the interatomic interactions in a Bose-Einstein condensate by coherently coupling two atomic states with intra- and inter-state scattering lengths of opposite signs. We measure the elastic and inelastic scattering properties of the system and find good agreement with a theoretical model describing the interactions between dressed states. In the attractive regime, we observe the formation of bright solitons formed by dressed-state atoms. Finally, we study the response of the system to an interaction quench from repulsive to attractive values, and observe how the r…
In the present work, we revisit two-component Bose-Einstein condensates in their fully three-dimensional (3d) form. Motivated by earlier studies of dark-bright solitons in the 1d case, we explore the stability of these structures in their fully 3d form in two variants. In one the dark soliton is planar and trapping a planar bright (disk) soliton. In the other case, a dark spherical shell soliton creates an effective potential in which a bright spherical shell of atoms is trapped in the second component. We identify these solutions as numerically exact states (up to a prescribed accuracy) and p…
We suggest a method for creating bright matter solitons by loading a BEC of atoms in a driven tilted optical lattice. It is shown that one can realize the self-focussing regime for the wave-packet dynamics by properly adjusting the phase of the driving field with respect to the phase of Bloch oscillations. If atom-atom interactions are larger than some critical value $g_{min}$, this self-focussing regime is followed by the formation of bright solitons. Increasing the interactions above another critical value $g_{max}$ makes this process unstable. Instead of soliton formation one now meets the …
Attractive Bose-Einstein condensates can host two types of macroscopic self-bound states of different nature: bright solitons and quantum liquid droplets. Here, we investigate the connection between them with a Bose-Bose mixture confined in an optical waveguide. We develop a simple theoretical model to show that, depending on atom number and interaction strength, solitons and droplets can be smoothly connected or remain distinct states coexisting only in a bi-stable region. We experimentally measure their spin composition, extract their density for a broad range of parameters and map out the b…
This work deals with matter-wave bright soliton molecules in spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates described by three-component Gross-Pitaevskii equations with non-autonomous nonlinearities that can be tuned by Feshbach resonance management. Notably, it portrays the possibility of generating bright bound soliton molecules with the help of an exact analytic solution under a controlled velocity resonance mechanism. Results show that these soliton molecules experience the effects of time-varying nonlinearities and modulate themselves during propagation by keeping their stable properties. Significantly…
We investigate the coherent collision of anisotropic quasi-two-dimensional bright solitons in dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates. Our analysis is based on the extended Gross-Pitaevskii equation, and we use the split-operator method for the grid calculations and the time-dependent variational principle with an ansatz of coupled Gaussian functions to calculate the time evolution of the ground state. We compare the results of both approaches for collisions where initially the solitons are in the repelling side-by-side configuration and move towards each other with a specific momentum. We change th…
Adopting a mean-field description for a two-component atomic Bose-Einstein condensate, we study the stat- ics and dynamics of dark-bright solitons in the presence of localized impurities. We use adiabatic perturbation theory to derive an equation of motion for the dark-bright soliton center. We show that, counter-intuitively, an attractive (repulsive) delta-like impurity, acting solely on the bright soliton component, induces an effective localized barrier (well) in the effective potential felt by the soliton; this way, dark-bright solitons are reflected from (transmitted through) attractive (…
The center of mass of a bright soliton in a Bose-Einstein condensate may reveal Anderson localization in the presence of a weak disorder potential. We analyze the effects of interactions between two bright solitons on the Anderson localization phenomenon. Perturbation calculus shows that even very weak interactions modify localization properties of the system eigenstates. For stronger interactions, i.e. when the solitons are close to each other, the localization is totally broken. It implies that in order to experimentally observe the Anderson localization effects, a single bright soliton has …
Synthetic spin-tensor-momentum coupling has recently been proposed to realize in atomic Bose-Einstein condensates. Here we study bright solitons in Bose-Einstein condensates with spin-tensor-momentum coupling and spin-orbit coupling. The properties and dynamics of spin-tensor-momentum-coupled and spin-orbit-coupled bright solitons are identified to be different. We contribute the difference to the different symmetries.
Considering a periodically oscillating harmonic potential, we explore the dynamics properties of bright solitons in a Bose-Einstein condensate. It is found that under a slower oscillating potential, soliton movement exhibits a nonperiodic oscillation while it is hardly affected under a fast oscillating potential. Furthermore, the head-on and/or "chase" collisions of two solitons have been obtained, which can be controlled by the oscillating frequency of potential.
A recent experiment has detected collision-induced frequency shifts in bright matter-wave solitons for the first time [Nat. Phys. 10, 918 (2014)]. Using a particle model, we derive the frequency shift for two solitons in a harmonic trap, and compare it to the results of the recent experiment and reported theoretical approximation. We find regimes where the frequency shift is much smaller than previously predicted, and propose experiments to test these findings. We also predict that reducing the experimental trap frequency will reveal for the first time soliton molecules or soliton bound states…
By solving the three-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation we generate two-dimensional axially-symmetric and anisotropic dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate bright solitons, for repulsive atomic interaction, stabilized by only a weak one-dimensional optical lattice (OL) aligned along and perpendicular, respectively, to the dipole polarization direction. In the former case vortex solitons can also be created. We show that it is possible to make a stable array of small interacting axially-symmetric dipolar solitons put on alternate OL sites. Further, we demonstrate the elastic nature of the collisi…
We consider a one-dimensional matter-wave bright soliton, corresponding to the ground bound state of N particles of mass m having a binary attractive delta potential interaction on the open line. For a full N-body quantum treatment, we derive several results for the scattering of this quantum soliton on a short-range, bounded from below, external potential, restricting to the low energy, elastic regime where the centre-of-mass kinetic energy of the incoming soliton is lower than the internal energy gap of the soliton, that is the minimal energy required to extract particles from the soliton.
At very low temperature, a quasi-one-dimensional ensemble of atoms with attractive interactions tend to form a bright soliton. When exposed to a sufficiently weak external potential, the shape of the soliton is not modified, but its external motion is affected. We develop in detail the Bogoliubov approach for the problem, treating, in a non-perturbative way, the motion of the center of mass of the soliton. Quantization of this motion allows us to discuss its long time properties. In particular, in the presence of a disordered potential, the quantum motion of the center of mass of a bright soli…
We present a comprehensive analysis of the form and interaction of dipolar bright solitons across the full parameter space afforded by dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates, revealing the rich behaviour introduced by the non-local nonlinearity. Working within an effective one-dimensional description, we map out the existence of the soliton solutions and show three collisional regimes: free collisions, bound state formation and soliton fusion. Finally, we examine the solitons in their full three-dimensional form through a variational approach; along with regimes of instability to collapse and runaw…
We study the vortex-bright solitons in a quasi-two-dimensional spin-orbit-coupled (SO-coupled) hyperfine spin-1 three-component Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) using variational method and numerical solution of a mean-field model. The ground state of these vortex-bright solitons is radially symmetric for weak ferromagnetic and polar interactions. For a sufficiently strong ferromagnetic interaction, we observe the emergence of an asymmetric vortex-bright soliton as the ground state. We also numerically investigate stable moving solitons and binary collision between them. The present mean-field m…
