The Snake Instability of Ring Dark Solitons in Toroidally Trapped Bose-Einstein Condensates

Abstract

We show that the onset of the snake instability of ring dark solitons requires a broken symmetry. We also elucidate explicitly the connection between imaginary Bogoliubov modes and the snake instability, predicting the number of vortex-anti-vortex pairs produced. In addition, we propose a simple model to give a physical motivation as to why the snake instability takes place. Finally, we show that tight confinement in a toroidal potential actually enhances soliton decay due to inhibition of soliton motion.

5 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Oblique dark solitons in supersonic flow of a Bose-Einstein condensate
• A vortex dipole in a trapped two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate
• Traveling Dark Solitons in Superfluid Fermi Gases
• A Smooth, Inductively Coupled Ring Trap for Atoms
• Exact Soliton-like Solutions of the Radial Gross-Pitaevskii Equation
• Tailoring of motional states in double-well potentials by time-dependent processes

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Quantum simulation of non-trivial topology
• Analysis of a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate in terms of position, momentum, and angular-momentum variance
• Observation of self-patterned defect formation in atomic superfluids -- from ring dark solitons to vortex dipole necklaces
• Condensates in annuli: Dimensionality of the variance
• Dynamical nonlinear excitations induced by interaction quench in a two-dimensional box-trapped Bose-Einstein condensate
• Observation of self-oscillating supersonic flow across an acoustic horizon in two dimensions
• Parametric triggering of vortices in toroidally trapped rotating Bose-Einstein condensates
• Variational Approach to the Snake Instability of a Bose-Einstein Condensate Soliton