Three-dimensional vortex-bright solitons in a spin-orbit coupled spin-$1$ condensate

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the existence and stability of three-dimensional vortex-bright solitons in a spin-orbit coupled spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate, revealing how interactions influence their symmetry and motion.

Contribution

It introduces a mean-field model showing stable vortex-bright solitons in 3D spinor BECs with spin-orbit coupling, including their symmetry properties and motion characteristics.

Findings

Vortex-bright solitons are stable and metastable in the model.

Weak polar interactions lead to axially symmetric ground states.

Strong ferromagnetic interactions cause asymmetric vortex-bright solitons.

Abstract

We demonstrate stable and metastable vortex-bright solitons in a three-dimensional spin-orbit-coupled three-component hyperfine spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) using numerical solution and variational approximation of a mean-field model. The spin-orbit coupling provides attraction to form vortex-bright solitons in both attractive and repulsive spinor BECs. The ground state of these vortex-bright solitons is axially symmetric for weak polar interaction. For a sufficiently strong ferromagnetic interaction, we observe the emergence of a fully asymmetric vortex-bright soliton as the ground state. We also numerically investigate moving solitons. The present mean-field model is not Galilean invariant, and we use a Galilean-transformed mean-field model for generating the moving solitons.