Soliton tunneling

TL;DR

This paper numerically investigates how topological solitons interact with various impurities, revealing classical behavior in repulsive cases and tunneling phenomena in attractive scenarios.

Contribution

It provides new insights into soliton-impurity interactions, especially highlighting the absence of tunneling in finite-width barriers despite the soliton's extended structure.

Findings

Attractive impurities induce soliton tunneling similar to delta-function impurities.

Repulsive impurities cause classical scattering with no tunneling.

Solitons do not tunnel through finite-width barriers at sub-barrier energies.

Abstract

We present a numerical simulation of the scattering of a topological soliton off finite size attractive impurities, repulsive impurities and a combination of both. The attractive and attractive-repulsive cases show similar features to those found for $\delta$ function type of impurities. For the repulsive case, corresponding to a finite width barrier, the soliton behaves completely classically. No tunneling occurs for sub-barrier kinetic energies despite the extended nature of the soliton.