Formation of solitons in atomic Bose-Einstein condensates by dark-state adiabatic passage

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel laser-based technique for creating solitons in elongated Bose-Einstein Condensates, enabling precise control over soliton properties and overcoming diffraction limits of traditional methods.

Contribution

The authors present a new adiabatic passage method using laser beams with Hermite-Gaussian modes to generate and manipulate solitons in BECs, including multicomponent and closely spaced solitons.

Findings

Method successfully creates dark and vector solitons in BECs.

Enables formation of multiple solitons with small velocities.

Circumvents diffraction limit restrictions of phase imprinting.

Abstract

We propose a new method of creating solitons in elongated Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs) by sweeping three laser beams through the BEC. If one of the beams is in the first order (TEM10) Hermite-Gaussian mode, its amplitude has a transversal phase slip which can be transferred to the atoms creating a soliton. Using this method it is possible to circumvent the restriction set by the diffraction limit inherent to conventional methods such as phase imprinting. The method allows one to create multicomponent (vector) solitons of the dark-bright form as well as the dark-dark combination. In addition it is possible to create in a controllable way two or more dark solitons with very small velocity and close to each other for studying their collisional properties.