Collisions of solitary waves in condensates beyond mean-field theory
Bright solitary waves in a Bose-Einstein condensate contain thousands of identical atoms held together despite their only weakly attractive contact interactions. They nonetheless behave like a compound object, staying whole in collisions, with their collision properties strongly affected by intersol...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article (Journal) |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
6 April 2020
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| In: |
Physical review
Year: 2020, Volume: 101, Issue: 4 |
| ISSN: | 2469-9934 |
| DOI: | 10.1103/PhysRevA.101.043604 |
| Online Access: | Verlag, lizenzpflichtig, Volltext: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.101.043604 Verlag, lizenzpflichtig, Volltext: https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevA.101.043604 
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| Author Notes: | Aparna Sreedharan, Sarthak Choudhury, Rick Mukherjee, Alexey Streltsov, and Sebastian Wüster |
| Summary: | Bright solitary waves in a Bose-Einstein condensate contain thousands of identical atoms held together despite their only weakly attractive contact interactions. They nonetheless behave like a compound object, staying whole in collisions, with their collision properties strongly affected by intersoliton quantum coherence. We show that separate solitary waves decohere due to phase diffusion, dependent on their effective ambient temperature, after which their initial mean-field relative phases are no longer well defined or relevant for collisions. In this situation, collisions occur predominantly repulsively and can no longer be described within mean-field theory. When considering the timescales involved in recent solitary wave experiments where nonequilibrium phenomena play an important role, these features could explain the predominantly repulsive collision dynamics observed in most condensate soliton train experiments. |
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| Item Description: | Gesehen am 28.04.2020 |
| Physical Description: | Online Resource |
| ISSN: | 2469-9934 |
| DOI: | 10.1103/PhysRevA.101.043604 |