Spontaneous Crystallization And Filamentation Of Solitons In Dipolar Condensates

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that long-range inter-site interactions in dipolar condensates can spontaneously generate soliton filaments and crystalline structures, revealing new self-assembly phenomena in ultra-cold gases.

Contribution

It introduces the first observation of spontaneous formation of soliton filaments and crystals due to modulational instability in dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates.

Findings

Formation of soliton filaments observed

Crystalline arrangements of solitons demonstrated

Spontaneous self-assembly under realistic conditions

Abstract

Inter-site interactions play a crucial role in polar gases in optical lattices even in the absence of hopping. We show that due to these long-range interactions a destabilized stack of quasi-one dimensional Bose-Einstein condensates develops a correlated modulational instability in the non-overlapping sites. Interestingly, this density pattern may evolve spontaneously into soliton filaments or a crystal of solitons that can be so created for the first time in ultra-cold gases. These self-assembled structures may be observed under realistic conditions within current experimental feasibilities.