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Physical Review A

Maxon and roton solitons in a Rydberg-dressed Bose-Einstein condensate

Yuxi Chen, Chao Hang, Guoxiang Huang

Published Apr 21, 2025• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We present a scheme to generate maxon and roton solitons via the maxon and roton excitations of a Rydberg-dressed Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). We show that the strong, long-range Rydberg-Rydberg interaction between Rydberg atoms can drastically alter the linear excitation spectrum of the quasiparticles (phonons) on the homogeneous background of the BEC, which displays obvious maxon-roton character and can be tuned actively by adjusting the strength of the Rydberg-Rydberg interaction and Rydberg blockade radius. We also show that the system supports both bright maxon and dark roton solitons if the center wave numbers of excited wave packets are chosen respectively to be those of the maxon and roton. Moreover, we corroborate that both the maxon and roton solitons are dynamical stable during the evolution if system parameters are kept in the domain where the homogeneous background of the BEC is modulationally stable. The results reported are beneficial not only for understanding the physical property of Rydberg-dressed BECs, but also for creating and actively manipulating new types of nonlinear matter-wave excitations in cold atomic gases.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.111.043318

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We present a scheme to generate maxon and roton solitons via the maxon and roton excitations of a Rydberg-dressed Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). We show that the strong, long-range Rydberg-Rydberg interaction between Rydberg atoms can drastically alter the linear excitation spectrum of the quasiparticles (phonons) on the homogeneous background of the BEC, which displays obvious maxon-roton character and can be tuned actively by adjusting the strength of the Rydberg-Rydberg interaction and Rydberg blockade radius. We also show that the system supports both bright maxon and dark roton solitons if the center wave numbers of excited wave packets are chosen respectively to be those of the maxon and roton. Moreover, we corroborate that both the maxon and roton solitons are dynamical stable during the evolution if system parameters are kept in the domain where the homogeneous background of the BEC is modulationally stable. The results reported are beneficial not only for understanding the physical property of Rydberg-dressed BECs, but also for creating and actively manipulating new types of nonlinear matter-wave excitations in cold atomic gases.
We investigate the dynamics of a three-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate of ultracold atomic gases with a soft-core-shaped long-range interaction, which is induced by laser dressing the atoms to a highly excited Rydberg state. For a homogeneous condensate, the long-range interaction drastically alters the dispersion relation of the excitation, supporting both roton and maxon modes. Rotons are typically responsible for the creation of supersolids, while maxons are normally dynamically unstable in BECs with dipolar interactions. We show that maxon modes in the Rydberg-dressed condensate, on the contrary, are dynamically stable. We find that the maxon modes can be excited through an interaction quench, i.e., turning on the soft-core interaction instantaneously. The emergence of the maxon modes is accompanied by oscillations at high frequencies in the quantum depletion, while rotons lead to much slower oscillations. The dynamically stable excitation of the roton and maxon modes leads to persistent oscillations in the quantum depletion. Through a self-consistent Bogoliubov approach, we identify the dependence of the maxon mode on the soft-core interaction. Our study shows that maxon and roton modes can be excited dynamically and simultaneously by quenching Rydberg-dressed long-range interactions. This is relevant to current studies in creating and probing exotic states of matter with ultracold atomic gases.
We present a scheme to generate nonlocal optical Kerr nonlinearity and polaritonic solitons via matter-wave superradiance in a Rydberg-dressed Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). We show that the polariton spectrum of the scattered field generated by the superradiance is changed significantly due to the existence of the long-range Rydberg-Rydberg interaction between atoms, i.e. it has a roton-maxon form; moreover, the BEC structure factor displays a strong dependence on the Rydberg-dressing, which can be tuned in a controllable way. We also show that such a Rydberg-dressed BEC system can support a giant nonlocal optical Kerr nonlinearity, and hence allow the formation and stable propagation of polaritonic solitons, which have ultraslow propagation velocity and ultralow generation power. The results reported here are useful to understand the unique properties of Rydberg-dressing in BECs and have potential applications in optical information processing and transmission.
Roton-type excitations usually emerge from strong correlations or long-range interactions, as in superfluid helium or dipolar ultracold atoms. However, in a weakly short-range interacting quantum gas, the recently synthesized spin-orbit (SO) coupling can lead to various unconventional phases of superfluidity and give rise to an excitation spectrum of roton-maxon character. Using Bragg spectroscopy, we study a SO-coupled Bose-Einstein condensate of ^{87}Rb atoms and show that the excitation spectrum in a "magnetized" phase clearly possesses a two-branch and roton-maxon structure. As Raman coupling strength Ω is decreased, a roton-mode softening is observed, as a precursor of the phase transition to a stripe phase that spontaneously breaks spatially translational symmetry. The measured roton gaps agree well with theoretical calculations. Furthermore, we determine sound velocities both in the magnetized and in the nonmagnetized phases, and a phonon-mode softening is observed around the phase transition in between. The validity of the f-sum rule is examined.
We study the behavior of a Bose-Einstein condensate in which atoms are weakly coupled to a highly excited Rydberg state. Since the latter have very strong van der Waals interactions, this coupling induces effective, nonlocal interactions between the dressed ground state atoms, which, opposed to dipolar interactions, are isotropically repulsive. Yet, one finds partial attraction in momentum space, giving rise to a roton-maxon excitation spectrum and a transition to a supersolid state in three-dimensional condensates. A detailed analysis of decoherence and loss mechanisms suggests that these phenomena are observable with current experimental capabilities.
Generating stable bright solitons in free space has been a long-standing goal in the study of matter waves in Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs). Rydberg-induced matter wave demonstrates an excellent effect in balancing the repulsive and attractive interactions between remote atoms. Parity-time (PT) symmetric lattices have been widely studied in controlling the flow of matter waves. In this study, we theoretically investigated the localization of nonlinear matter waves in the PT-symmetric Rydberg atomic BECs system. The numerical simulation method was used to obtain the stationary solutions of the wave function by solving the Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE) of the Rydberg-dressed BECs system. Fundamental, higher-order solitons and vortical ones were uncovered, and their stabilities were evaluated through linear-stability analysis and direct simulation with perturbation. Furthermore, the collision of solitons exhibited a quasi-elastic feature.
In this paper, we study Bose-Einstein condensation of Rydberg-dressed atoms considering finite range interactions. We use Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov approximation based on Mean-Field approach. Moreover, within this approximation modified by the finite-range character of the two-body interaction we shall obtain analytical expressions for thermodynamic quantities of Rydberg-dressed Bose gas. The imaginary part of the quasiparticle spectrum of a BEC signals the instability of the roton mode with respect to the formation of supersolid state. Our theory predicts a second-order quantum phase transition from BEC to supersolid phase for Rydberg-dressed bosons in three dimensions.