Exploring the Stability and Dynamics of Dipolar Matter-Wave Dark Solitons

TL;DR

This paper investigates the stability, formation, and interactions of dark solitons in dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates, revealing how dipolar interactions and instabilities influence their dynamics and collisions.

Contribution

It provides a numerical analysis of dark solitons in dipolar BECs, highlighting the effects of key parameters and instabilities on their behavior and interactions.

Findings

Dark solitons propagate without dispersion in dipolar BECs.

Collisions are elastic away from instabilities, with dipolar interactions affecting their nature.

Proximity to instabilities causes weakly dissipative collisions.

Abstract

We study the stability, form and interaction of single and multiple dark solitons in quasi-one-dimensional dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates. The solitons are found numerically as stationary solutions in the moving frame of a non-local Gross Pitaevskii equation, and characterized as a function of the key experimental parameters, namely the ratio of the dipolar atomic interactions to the van der Waals interactions, the polarization angle and the condensate width. The solutions and their integrals of motion are strongly affected by the phonon and roton instabilities of the system. Dipolar matter-wave dark solitons propagate without dispersion, and collide elastically away from these instabilities, with the dipolar interactions contributing an additional repulsion or attraction to the soliton-soliton interaction. However, close to the instabilities, the collisions are weakly dissipative.