The form and stability properties of axisymmetric and spherically symmetric stationary states in two and three dimensions, respectively, are elucidated for Bose-Einstein condensates. These states include the ground state, central vortices, and radial excitations of both. The latter are called ring solitons in two dimensions and spherical shells in three. The nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation is taken as the fundamental model; both extended and harmonically trapped condensates are considered. It is found that the instability times of ring solitons can be long compared to experimental time scales, making them effectively stable over the lifetime of an experiment.
The form and stability properties of axisymmetric and spherically symmetric stationary states in two and three dimensions, respectively, are elucidated for Bose-Einstein condensates. These states include the ground state, central vortices, and radial excitations of both. The latter are called ring solitons in two dimensions and spherical shells in three. The nonlinear Schr"odinger equation is taken as the fundamental model; both extended and harmonically trapped condensates are considered. It is found that the instability times of ring solitons can be long compared to experimental time scales, making them effectively stable over the lifetime of an experiment.
The form and stability of quantum vortices in Bose-Einstein condensates with attractive atomic interactions is elucidated. They appear as ring bright solitons, and are a generalization of the Townes soliton to nonzero winding number m. An infinite sequence of radially excited stationary states appear for each value of m, which are characterized by concentric matter-wave rings separated by nodes, in contrast to repulsive condensates, where no such set of states exists. It is shown that robustly stable as well as unstable regimes may be achieved in confined geometries, thereby suggesting that vortices and their radial excited states can be observed in experiments on attractive condensates in two dimensions.
A three-dimensional study of the ring vortex solitons is conducted for both attractive and repulsive Bose-Einstein condensates subject to harmonic potential confinement. A family of stationary ring vortex solitons, which is defined by the radial excitation number and the winding number of the intrinsic vorticity, are obtained numerically for a given atomic interaction strength. We find that stabilities of the ground and radially excited states of the ring vortex soliton are dependent on the winding number differently. The ground state of the ring vortex soliton with the large winding number is unstable dynamically against random perturbation. The radially excited state of the ring vortex soliton with large winding number corresponds to the increased collapse threshold and therefore can be made stable for sufficiently small atomic interaction strengths. The ground and radially excited states also demonstrate different dynamic evolutions under large atomic interaction strengths. The former exhibits simultaneous symmetric splitting in the transverse plane, while the latter displays periodic expand-merge cycles in the longitudinal direction.
The three-dimensional study of the ring vortex solitons is conducted for both attractive and repulsive BECs subject to harmonic potential confinement. A family of stationary ring vortex solitons, which is defined by the radial excitation number and the winding number of the intrinsic vorticity, are obtained numerically for a given atomic interaction strength. We find that stabilities of the ground and radially excited states of the ring vortex soliton are dependent on the winding number differently. The ground state of the ring vortex soliton with the large winding number is unstable dynamically against random perturbation. The radially excited state of the ring vortex soliton with large winding number corresponds to the increased collapse threshold, and therefore can be made stable for sufficiently small atomic interaction strengths. The ground and radially excited states also demonstrate different dynamical evolutions under large atomic interaction strengths. The former exhibits simultaneously symmetrical splitting in the transverse plane, while the latter displays periodically expand-merge cycles in the longitudinal direction.
In this work we study spherical shell dark soliton states in three-dimensional atomic Bose-Einstein condensates. Their symmetry is exploited in order to analyze their existence, as well as that of topologically charged variants of the structures, and, importantly, to identify their linear stability Bogoliubov--de Gennes spectrum. We compare our effective one-dimensional spherical and two-dimensional cylindrical computations with the full three-dimensional numerics. An important conclusion is that such spherical shell solitons can be stable sufficiently close to the linear limit of the isotropic condensates considered herein. We have also identified their instabilities leading to the emergence of vortex line and vortex ring cages. In addition, we generalize effective particle pictures of lower-dimensional dark solitons and ring dark solitons to the spherical shell solitons concerning their equilibrium radius and effective dynamics around it. In this case too, we favorably compare, qualitatively and quantitatively, the resulting predictions such as the shell equilibrium radius with full numerical solutions in three dimensions.
Soliton is an exotic topological excitation, and it widely exists in various nonlinear systems, such as nonlinear optics, Bose-Einstein condensates, classical and quantum fluids, plasma, magnetic materials, etc. A stable soliton can propagate with constant amplitude and velocity, and maintain its shape. Two-dimensional and three-dimensional solitons are usually hard to stabilize, and how to realize stable two-dimensional or three-dimensional solitons has aroused the great interest of the researchers. Ring dark soliton is a kind of two-dimensional soliton, which was first theoretically predicted and experimentally realized in nonlinear optical systems. Compared with the usual two-dimensional solitons, ring dark solitons have good stability and rich dynamical behaviors. Owing to their highly controllable capability, Bose-Einstein condensates provide a new platform for studying the ring dark solitons. Based on the recent progress in Bose-Einstein condensates and solitons, this paper reviews the research on the analytic solutions, stability, as well as the decay dynamics of ring dark solitons in Bose-Einstein condensates. A transform method is introduced, which generalizes the analytic solutions of ring dark solitons from a homogeneous system with time-independent nonlinearity to a harmonically trapped inhomogeneous system with time-dependent nonlinearity. The stability phase diagram of the ring dark soliton under deformation perturbations is discussed by numerically solving the Gross-Pitaevskii equations in the mean-field theory. A method of enhancing the stability of ring dark solitons by periodically modulating the nonlinear coefficients is introduced. It is also shown that the periodically modulated nonlinear coefficient can be experimentally realized by the Feshbach resonance technology. In addition, we discuss the dynamics of the decay of ring dark solitons. It is found that the ring dark soliton can decay into various vortex clusters composed of vortices and antivortices. This opens a new avenue to the investigation of vortex dynamics and quantum turbulence. It is also found that the ring dark solitons combined with periodic modulated nonlinearity can give rise to the pattern formation, which is an interesting nonlinear phenomenon widely explored in all the fields of nature. Finally, some possible research subjects about ring dark solitons in future research are also discussed.
We systematically construct stationary soliton states in a one-component, two-dimensional, repulsive, Gross-Pitaevskii equation with a ring-shaped targetlike trap similar to the potential used to confine a Bose-Einstein condensate in a recent experiment [R. Mathew, A. Kumar, S. Eckel, F. Jendrzejewski, G. K. Campbell, M. Edwards, and E. Tiesinga, Phys. Rev. A 92, 033602 (2015)]. In addition to the ground-state configuration, we identify a wide variety of excited states involving phase jumps (and associated dark solitons) inside the ring. These configurations are obtained from a systematic bifurcation analysis starting from the linear, small atom density, limit. We study the stability and, when unstable, the dynamics of the most basic configurations. Often these lead to vortical dynamics inside the ring persisting over long time scales in our numerical experiments. To illustrate the relevance of the identified states, we showcase how such dark-soliton configurations (even the unstable ones) can be created in laboratory condensates by using phase-imprinting techniques.