Many-body Matter-wave Dark Soliton

TL;DR

This paper investigates how many-body quantum effects influence dark solitons in Bose-Einstein condensates, revealing that individual realizations can show completely dark solitons despite a uniform average density.

Contribution

It demonstrates through quasi-exact many-body simulations that dark solitons can appear fully dark in single realizations even when the average density is uniform, highlighting many-body effects.

Findings

Single realizations show fully dark solitons.

Single particle density tends to be uniform.

Many-body effects fill the soliton in average density.

Abstract

The Gross-Pitaevskii equation - which describes interacting bosons in the mean-field approximation - possesses solitonic solutions in dimension one. For repulsively interacting particles, the stationary soliton is dark, i.e. is represented by a local density minimum. Many-body effects may lead to filling of the dark soliton. Using quasi-exact many-body simulations, we show that, in single realizations, the soliton appears totally dark although the single particle density tends to be uniform.