# Splitting and recombination of bright-solitary-matter waves

## TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the splitting and recombination of bright-solitary-matter waves in a Bose-Einstein condensate, highlighting their potential for highly sensitive interferometry due to their non-dispersive nature.

## Contribution

It presents the first experimental realization of splitting and recombination of bright-solitary-matter waves, essential steps toward soliton-based interferometers.

## Key findings

- Interference-mediated recombination can dominate over classical effects with narrow barriers.
- Recombination is highly sensitive to experimental parameters.
- Bright-solitary-matter waves can be manipulated for interferometric applications.

## Abstract

Solitons are long-lived wavepackets that propagate without dispersion and exist in a wide range of one-dimensional (1D) nonlinear systems. A Bose-Einstein condensate trapped in a quasi-1D waveguide can support bright-solitary-matter waves (3D analogues of solitons) when interatomic interactions are sufficiently attractive that they cancel dispersion. Solitary-matter waves are excellent candidates for a new generation of highly sensitive interferometers, as their non-dispersive nature allows them to acquire phase shifts for longer times than conventional matter-waves interferometers. However, such an interferometer is yet to be realised experimentally. In this work, we demonstrate the splitting and recombination of a bright-solitary-matter wave on a narrow repulsive barrier, which brings together the fundamental components of an interferometer. We show that both interference-mediated recombination and classical velocity filtering effects are important, but for a sufficiently narrow barrier interference-mediated recombination can dominate. We reveal the extreme sensitivity of interference-mediated recombination to the experimental parameters, highlighting the potential of soliton interferometry.