Watching Dark Solitons Decay into Vortex Rings in a Bose-Einstein Condensate

Abstract

We have created spatial dark solitons in two-component Bose-Einstein condensates in which the soliton exists in one of the condensate components and the soliton nodal plane is filled with the second component. The filled solitons are stable for hundreds of milliseconds. The filling can be selectively removed, making the soliton more susceptible to dynamical instabilities. For a condensate in a spherically symmetric potential, these instabilities cause the dark soliton to decay into stable vortex rings. We have imaged the resulting vortex rings.

Matter Wave Solitons at Finite Temperatures

“…In three dimensions a soliton is dynamically unstable to undulations in its transverse profile. This so-called "snake" instability leads to the soliton decaying to vortex lines or rings, and has been observed experimentally 4,5 . This instability, however, can be suppressed by confining the condensate much more strongly in the transverse direction than longitudinally, so that the condensate is highly elongated along the axial direction.…”

“…Dark solitons represent a ubiquitous feature of nonlinear systems 1 , and their experimental realization in atomic Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) 2,3,4,5 has opened up new possibilities for their study. The stability of the soliton, and its dependence upon the geometry of the condensate, is a problem of considerable interest.…”

Stable and mobile two-dimensional dipolar ring-dark-in-bright Bose–Einstein condensate soliton

“…Although the pioneering experiments on quasi-1D dark solitons [4] faced technical difficulties in their stabilization due to thermal and dynamical effects, these problems are somewhat under control in recent investigations and different aspects and properties of dark solitons are being studied lately [9]. The dynamical instability of the dark solitons becomes explicit, when the quasi-1D condition is relaxed, and bending and snaking (dynamical) instability of the dark solitons seriously hamper both theoretical and experimental studies [5,6,10].…”

Spatially-antisymmetric localization of matter wave in a bichromatic optical lattice

“…The two humps appear in a single site of the OL potential. Doublehumped structures have been created in a BEC by phase imprinting and other methods [30,31] and also have been studied theoretically [32][33][34][35]. This makes the present investigation also of experimental interest.…”