Skyrmion dynamics and disintegration in a spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate

TL;DR

This paper investigates the stability and evolution of skyrmion spin textures in spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates, revealing their inherent instability and the influence of vorticity and trapping potential on their disintegration.

Contribution

It provides a combined analytical and numerical analysis demonstrating the instability and disintegration mechanisms of skyrmions in spinor BECs.

Findings

Skyrmions are inherently unstable in spin-1 BECs.

Initial pure states evolve into mixtures of magnetic order parameters.

Vorticity and trapping potential accelerate disintegration.

Abstract

Dynamics of skyrmionic spin texture in the spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate is examined by analytical and numerical means. We show the skyrmion (coreless vortex) to be inherently unstable in the sense that the state initially prepared purely within the antiferromagnetic (ferromagnetic) order parameter manifold inevitably evolves into a mixture of both. The vorticity-dependent drift in the presence of the trapping potential also contributes to the disintegration of the initial spin texture manifold. We argue that the notion of a skyrmion as a topologically protected entity becomes ill defined during the dynamical evolution process.