Observation of sine-Gordon-like solitons in a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate

Abstract

We experimentally generate sine-Gordon-like solitons in a spin-1 spinor Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) utilizing a robust and reproducible local phase-imprinting scheme. We find that the soliton velocity can be tuned by the effective quadratic Zeeman shift. This enables the investigation of controlled soliton interactions, in which we observe the characteristic elastic collision behavior of the integrable sine-Gordon model. The spatial displacement -- the so-called phase shift -- between incoming and outgoing solitons, the signature of their pairwise interaction, is found to be in quantitative agreement with numerical spin-1 simulations within the error bars. These results establish spinor BECs as a highly controllable experimental platform for studying aspects of the dynamics of sine-Gordon-like models.

References in corpus (14)

• Realization of a Townes soliton in a two-component planar Bose gas
• Preparing and Analyzing Solitons in the sine-Gordon Model with Quantum Gas Microscopes
• Exact Thermodynamics and Transport in the Classical Sine-Gordon Model
• The sine-Gordon model from coupled condensates: a Generalized Hydrodynamics viewpoint
• Dark soliton-like magnetic domain walls in a two-dimensional ferromagnetic superfluid
• Propagating Ferrodark Solitons in a Superfluid: Exact Solutions and Anomalous Dynamics
• Condensation and thermalization of an easy-plane ferromagnet in a spinor Bose gas
• Dark-Antidark Spinor Solitons in Spin-1 Bose Gases
• Bloch Oscillations of a Soliton in a 1D Quantum Fluid
• Double sine-Gordon class of universal coarsening dynamics in a spin-1 Bose gas
• Absence of the breakdown of ferrodark solitons exhibiting a snake instability
• Core structure of static ferrodark solitons in a spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate
• Soliton confinement in the double sine-Gordon model
• Ferrodark soliton collisions: Breather formation, pair reproduction, and spin-mass separation