Observation of vector rogue waves in repulsive three-component atomic mixtures

TL;DR

This paper reports the experimental observation of vector rogue waves in highly imbalanced, three-component Bose-Einstein condensates, demonstrating the formation of Peregrine solitons and their tunability through hyperfine state manipulation.

Contribution

It introduces the first experimental observation of vector rogue waves in multi-component BECs and provides a generalized framework for understanding their formation in imbalanced systems.

Findings

Observation of vector Peregrine solitons in BECs

Tunable interactions via hyperfine states enable diverse rogue wave formations

Quantitative agreement with mean-field simulations

Abstract

We report the experimental observation of vector extensions of Peregrine solitons in highly particle-imbalanced, pairwise immiscible three-component repulsive Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs). The possibility of an effectively attractive character of the minority components is established by constructing a generalized reduction scheme for an imbalanced N-component setup with arbitrary interaction signs. These components may suffer intra- and inter-component modulation instability, which along with the presence of an attractive potential well induces the dynamical formation of highly reproducible vector rogue waves. Exploiting different Rb hyperfine states, it is possible to flexibly tune the effective interactions stimulating the realization of a plethora of vector rogue waves, including single and double Peregrine-like wave peaks. The experimental findings are in quantitative agreement with suitable three-dimensional mean-field simulations, while quasi-one-dimensional analysis of the non-polynomial Schr\"odinger model provides additional insights into the rogue wave characteristics.