Symbiotic solitons in a quasi-one- and quasi-two-dimensional spin-1 condensates

TL;DR

This paper investigates the formation, structure, and stability of symbiotic spinor solitons in quasi-1D and quasi-2D ferromagnetic spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates, highlighting the role of spin-orbit coupling in stabilization and novel spatial patterns.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of symbiotic spinor solitons in spin-1 BECs, demonstrating their stabilization via spin-orbit coupling and revealing complex spatial structures in higher dimensions.

Findings

Quasi-1D symbiotic solitons have Gaussian density profiles.

Quasi-2D solitons exhibit novel spatial periodic structures.

Strong spin-orbit coupling leads to stripe and superlattice solitons.

Abstract

We study the formation of spin-1 symbiotic spinor solitons in a quasi-one- (quasi-1D) and quasi-two-dimensional (quasi-2D) hyper-fine spin $F=1$ ferromagnetic Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). The symbiotic solitons necessarily have a repulsive intraspecies interaction and are bound due to an attractive interspecies interaction. Due to a collapse instability in higher dimensions, an additional spin-orbit coupling is necessary to stabilize a quasi-2D symbiotic spinor soliton. Although a quasi-1D symbiotic soliton has a simple Gaussian-type density distribution, novel spatial periodic structure in density is found in quasi-2D symbiotic SO-coupled spinor solitons. For a weak SO coupling, the quasi-2D solitons are of the $(-1, 0, +1)$ or $(+1, 0, -1)$ type with intrinsic vorticity and multi-ring structure, for Rashba or Dresselhaus SO coupling, respectively, where the numbers in the parentheses are angular momenta projections in spin components $F_z = +1, 0, -1$, respectively. For a strong SO coupling, stripe and superlattice solitons, respectively, with a stripe and square-lattice modulation in density, are found in addition to the multi-ring solitons. The stationary states were obtained by imaginary-time propagation of a mean-field model; dynamical stability of the solitons was established by real-time propagation over a long period of time. The possibility of the creation of such a soliton by removing the trap of a confined spin-1 BEC in a laboratory is also demonstrated.