Photon-atomic solitons in a Bose-Einstein condensate trapped in a soft optical lattice
Abstract
We investigate the ground state (GS) of a collisionless Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) trapped in a soft one-dimensional optical lattice (OL), which is formed by two counterpropagating optical beams perturbed by the BEC density profile through the local-field effect (LFE). We show that LFE gives rise to an envelope-deformation potential, a nonlocal potential resulting from the phase deformation, and an effective self-interaction of the condensate. As a result, stable photon-atomic lattice solitons, including an optical component, in the form of the deformation of the soft OL, in a combination with a localized matter-wave component, are generated in the blue-detuned setting, without any direct interaction between atoms. These self-trapped modes, which realize the system's GS, are essentially different from the gap solitons supported by the interplay of the OL potential and collisional interactions between atoms. A transition to tightly bound modes from loosely bound ones occurs with the increase of the number of atoms in the BEC.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1305.6632,
title = {Photon-atomic solitons in a Bose-Einstein condensate trapped in a soft optical lattice},
author = {Guangjiong Dong and Jiang Zhu and Weiping Zhang and Boris A. Malomed},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1305.6632},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
Physical Review Letters, in press