Resonant trapping in the transport of a matter-wave soliton through a quantum well

TL;DR

This paper explores how bright solitons in Bose-Einstein condensates interact with narrow attractive potential wells, revealing abrupt trapping phenomena due to resonant interactions and radiation effects, with implications for probing bound states.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical analysis combining numerical simulations and a variational approach to explain nonlinear trapping of solitons via resonance and radiation mechanisms.

Findings

Abrupt transition between reflection, transmission, and trapping of solitons.

Resonant interaction with bound states causes trapping.

Solitons can probe bound states inaccessible to single atoms.

Abstract

We theoretically investigate the scattering of bright solitons in a Bose-Einstein condensate on narrow attractive potential wells. Reflection, transmission and trapping of an incident soliton are predicted to occur with remarkably abrupt transitions upon varying the potential depth. Numerical simulations of the nonlinear Schroedinger equation are complemented by a variational collective coordinate approach. The mechanism for nonlinear trapping is found to rely both on resonant interaction between the soliton and bound states in the potential well as well as radiation of small amplitude waves. These results suggest that solitons can be used to probe bound states that are not accessible through scattering with single atoms.