Bright solitons in a 2D spin-orbit-coupled dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate

TL;DR

This paper investigates the formation and properties of bright solitons in a 2D spin-orbit-coupled dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate, revealing two distinct soliton types and their unique features due to anisotropic interactions.

Contribution

It introduces the existence of two novel soliton types in a 2D spin-orbit-coupled dipolar BEC with effective attractive interactions, highlighting their distinct properties and nontrivial dynamics.

Findings

Identified plane wave and stripe solitons as ground states.

Both soliton types are smaller and more anisotropic than non-spin-orbit-coupled solitons.

Discussed the nontrivial properties of moving solitons due to broken Galilean invariance.

Abstract

We study a two-dimensional spin-orbit-coupled dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate with repulsive contact interactions by both the variational method and the imaginary time evolution of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. The dipoles are completely polarized along one direction in the 2D plane so as to provide an effective attractive dipole-dipole interaction. We find two types of solitons as the ground states arising from such attractive interactions: a plane wave soliton with a spatially varying phase and a stripe soliton with a spatially oscillating density for each component. Both types of solitons possess smaller size and higher anisotropy than the soliton without spin-orbit coupling. Finally, we discuss the properties of moving solitons, which are nontrivial because of the violation of Galilean invariance.