8.1 Dimensional Aspects of Soliton Experiments
J. Br, Lincoln D. Carr, B. P. Anderson +1 more
The experimental work on solitons in BECs during the past decade has been extremely important in two respects. First, experiments have shown unam-biguously that solitons and related nonlinear waves do exist in BECs. This was disputed at the time when the first experiments were performed in 1999 [1,2] and may still be found surprising given that we are dealing with a quan-tum many-body system driven towards strongly non-equilibrium dynamics. Second, the experiments have inspired theoretical work in many directions. A particular example is the work on solitary waves in dimensional crossovers induced by trapping potentials that restrict the geometry, as discussed in Chap. 7. A ubiquitous feature in all of the experimental realizations of solitons so far is the three-dimensional nature of experimental set-ups, which can never be completely neglected in the interpretation of the results obtained. In this respect almost all of the experimental work discussed in this book falls into the wider area of “multidimensional solitons. ” In order to avoid the duplication of discussions led in other chapters, we chose to narrow the scope of this chapter to discuss mainly solitary waves with a genuinely multidimensional structure. We therefore restrict the discussion to experimental studies of the creation and dynamics of vortex rings in experiments at JILA [3] and Harvard [4, 5]. In particular, we completely omit the vast body of experimental work on line vortices and the related baby-skyrmions, i.e., vortices with filled cores [6, 7]), as these will be covered in Part VI. We also completely omit the experiments on bright solitons, and the first planar dark soliton experiments [1,2] that were primarily concerned with soli-ton observation and propagation in BECs rather than dynamical instabilities and soliton decay. Detailed reviews of these experiments can be found in
•Jan 13, 2016•0 citations