Inelastic Collisions of Solitary Waves in Anisotropic Bose-Einstein Condensates: Sling-Shot Events and Expanding Collision Bubbles

TL;DR

This paper investigates the complex inelastic collision dynamics of dark soliton stripes in anisotropic Bose-Einstein condensates, revealing the role of solitonic vortices and vortex rings in apparent soliton mergers and expanding collision bubbles.

Contribution

It provides experimental and theoretical insights into how solitonic vortices influence collision outcomes, including sling-shot events and expanding collision bubbles, in anisotropic BECs.

Findings

Solitonic vortices and vortex rings form due to insufficient transverse confinement.

Interactions can produce apparent inelastic collisions and soliton mergers.

Repeated inelastic collisions lead to expanding collision bubbles with increasing intervals.

Abstract

We study experimentally and theoretically the dynamics of apparent dark soliton stripes in an elongated Bose-Einstein condensate. We show that for the trapping strengths corresponding to our experimental setup, the transverse confinement along one of the tight directions is not strong enough to arrest the formation of solitonic vortices or vortex rings. These solitonic vortices and vortex rings, when integrated along the transverse direction, appear as dark soliton stripes along the longitudinal direction thereby hiding their true character. The latter significantly modifies the interaction dynamics during collision events and can lead to apparent examples of inelasticity and what may appear experimentally even as a merger of two dark soliton stripes. We explain this feature by means of the interaction of two solitonic vortices leading to a sling shot event with one of the solitonic vortices being ejected at a relatively large speed. Furthermore we observe expanding collision bubbles which consist of repeated inelastic collisions of a dark soliton stripe pair with an {\it increasing} time interval between collisions.