Skyrmion-string defects with arbitrary topological charges in spinor Bose-Einstein condensates

Abstract

Under the presence of external magnetic fields with cylindrical symmetry, Skyrmion-string defects with arbitrary topological charges are shown to appear in spinor $F=1$ Bose-Einstein condensates. We show that, depending on the magnetic field boundary condition, the topological spin texture, at the planes perpendicular to the cylindrical axis, can take zero, half integer, or arbitrary values between $-1/2$ and $1/2$. We argue that these are true topological defects since their charge is independent of the spatial location of the singularity and since the total Skyrmion charge is the sum of the individual charges of the defects present. Our findings are obtained by numerically solving the corresponding fully coupled Gross-Pitaevskii equations without any symmetry assumptions. We analyze, both, polar ${}^{23}$Na and ferromagnetic ${}^{87}$Rb condensates.

19 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (9)

• Observation of Dirac Monopoles in a Synthetic Magnetic Field
• Chiral Dynamics of Baryons from String Theory
• Stable Skyrmions in SU(2) Gauged Bose-Einstein Condensates
• Skyrmion-induced bound states in a superconductor
• Stability and internal structure of vortices in spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates with conserved magnetization
• Stability of coreless vortices in ferromagnetic spinor Bose-Einstein condensates
• Stable core symmetries and confined textures for a vortex line in a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate
• Skyrmion dynamics and disintegration in a spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate
• Macroscopic excitations in confined Bose-Einstein condensates, searching for quantum turbulence

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Single-domain Bose condensate magnetometer achieves energy resolution per bandwidth below $\hslash$
• Validity of Gross-Pitaevskii solutions of harmonically confined BEC gases in reduced dimensions
• Optical polarization skyrmionic fields in free space
• Hydrodynamic generation of skyrmions in a two-component Bose-Einstein condensate
• Unvortex Lattice and Topological Defects in Rigidly Rotating Multicomponent Superfluids