Realization of a Townes Soliton in a Two-Component Planar Bose Gas

Bakkali-Hassani, B.; Maury, C.; Zou, Y-Q; Le Cerf, E.; Saint-Jalm, R.; Castilho, P. C. M.; Nascimbene, S.; Dalibard, J. und Beugnon, J. (2021): Realization of a Townes Soliton in a Two-Component Planar Bose Gas. In: Physical Review Letters, Bd. 127, Nr. 2, 23603

Abstract

Most experimental observations of solitons are limited to one-dimensional (1D) situations, where they are naturally stable. For instance, in 1D cold Bose gases, they exist for any attractive interaction strength g and particle number N. By contrast, in two dimensions, solitons appear only for discrete values of gN, the so-called Townes soliton being the most celebrated example. Here, we use a two-component Bose gas to prepare deterministically such a soliton: Starting from a uniform bath of atoms in a given internal state, we imprint the soliton wave function using an optical transfer to another state. We explore various interaction strengths, atom numbers, and sizes and confirm the existence of a solitonic behavior for a specific value of gN and arbitrary sizes, a hallmark of scale invariance.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• Fakultät: Physik
• Themengebiete: 500 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik > 530 Physik
• ISSN: 0031-9007
• Sprache: Englisch