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Title: Reexamination of dynamical stabilization of matter-wave solitons

Journal Article · · Physical Review. A
 [1]; ;  [1]
  1. University of Electro-Communications, 1-5-1 Chofu-ga-oka, Chofu-shi, Tokyo 182-8585 (Japan)

We consider dynamical stabilization of Bose-Einstein condensates by time-dependent modulation of the scattering length. The problem has been studied before by several methods: Gaussian variational approximation, the method of moments, the method of modulated Townes soliton, and the direct averaging of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We summarize these methods and find that the numerically obtained stabilized solution has a different configuration than that assumed by the theoretical methods (in particular a phase of the wave function is not quadratic with r). We show that there is presently no clear evidence for stabilization in a strict sense, because in the numerical experiments only metastable (slowly decaying) solutions have been obtained. In other words, neither numerical nor mathematical evidence for a new kind of soliton solutions has been revealed so far. The existence of the metastable solutions is nevertheless an interesting and complicated phenomenon on its own. We try some non-Gaussian variational trial functions to obtain better predictions for the critical nonlinearity g{sub cr} for metastabilization but other dynamical properties of the solutions remain difficult to predict.

OSTI ID:
20857741
Journal Information:
Physical Review. A, Vol. 74, Issue 3; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.74.033613; (c) 2006 The American Physical Society; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1050-2947
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English