Spontaneous soliton formation and modulational instability in Bose-Einstein condensates

Preprint

23 December 2003

preprint
Published by arXiv in arXiv

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.cond-mat/0303257

Abstract

The dynamics of an elongated attractive Bose-Einstein condensate in an axisymmetric harmonic trap is studied. It is shown that density fringes caused by self-interference of the condensate order parameter seed modulational instability. The latter has novel features in contradistinction to the usual homogeneous case known from nonlinear fiber optics. Several open questions in the interpretation of the recent creation of the first matter-wave bright soliton train [Strecker {\it et al.} Nature {\bf 417} 150 (2002)] are addressed. It is shown that primary transverse collapse, followed by secondary collapse induced by soliton--soliton interactions, produce bursts of hot atoms at different time scales.

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All Related Versions

Version 1, 2003-03-13, ArXiv
Version 2, 2003-12-23, ArXiv
Published version: Physical Review Letters, 92 (4), 040401.

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