Death of soliton trains in attractive Bose-Einstein condensates

TL;DR

This paper investigates the dynamics of bright soliton trains in attractive Bose-Einstein Condensates, revealing that they quickly lose coherence and become fragmented, challenging previous assumptions about their stability.

Contribution

It provides a many-boson physics perspective showing the rapid decoherence and fragmentation of soliton trains, which is a novel insight into their quantum behavior.

Findings

Soliton trains lose coherence quickly

Fragmented BECs differ from coherent solitons

Sheds light on quantum properties of fragmented states

Abstract

Experiments on ultra-cold attractive Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs) have demonstrated that at low dimensions atomic clouds can form localized objects, propagating for long times without significant changes in their shapes and attributed to bright matter-wave solitons, which are coherent objects. We consider the dynamics of bright soliton trains from the perspective of many-boson physics. The fate of matter-wave soliton trains is actually to quickly loose their coherence and become macroscopically fragmented BECs. The death of the coherent matter-wave soliton trains gives birth to fragmented objects, whose quantum properties and experimental signatures differ substantially from what is currently assumed.