A photon in solitary confinement

Weibin Li

We study the dynamic structure factor of two coherent bright solitary waves in attractive Bose- Einstein condensates confined in a harmonic trap. We demonstrate that the wave function of the two solitary waves with a fixed relative phase shows interference in momentum space. The fringes are shifted depending on the values of the phase. This momentum interference can be extracted from the dynamic structure factor of the system using stimulated two-photon Bragg scattering. Thus our method provides a way to measure the relative phase directly.

Myron Wyn Evans, Jean Pierre Vigier, Sisir Roy +1 more

Nicholas G. Parker, Simon L. Cornish, Charles S. Adams +1 more

We analyse the static solutions of attractive Bose–Einstein condensates under transverse confinement, both with and without axial confinement. By full numerical solution of the Gross–Pitaevskii equation and variational methods we map out the condensate solutions, their energetic properties and their critical points for instability. With no axial confinement a bright solitary wave solution will tend to decay by dispersion unless the interaction energy is close to the critical value for collapse. In contrast, with axial confinement the only decay mechanism is collapse. The energetic stability of a bright solitary wave solution against decay increases with higher radial confinement. Finally, we consider the stability of dynamical states containing up to four solitons and find good agreement with recent experiments.

J. Smyrnakis, Manolis Magiropoulos, G. M. Kavoulakis +1 more

A two-component Bose-Einstein condensate that is confined in a one-dimensional ring potential supports solitary-wave solutions, which we evaluate analytically in the limit of a large ring. The derived solutions are shown to be unique. The corresponding dispersion relation that generalizes the case of a single-component system shows interesting features.