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Matter-wave solitons with a periodic, piecewise-constant scattering length
PHYSICAL REVIEW A
  • AS Rodrigues
  • PG Kevrekidis, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
  • MA Porter
  • DJ Frantzeskakis
  • P Schmelcher
  • AR Bishop
Publication Date
2008
Abstract

Motivated by recent proposals of “collisionally inhomogeneous” Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs), which have a spatially modulated scattering length, we study the existence and stability properties of bright and dark matter-wave solitons of a BEC characterized by a periodic, piecewise-constant scattering length. We use a “stitching” approach to analytically approximate the pertinent solutions of the underlying nonlinear Schrödinger equation by matching the wave function and its derivatives at the interfaces of the nonlinearity coefficient. To accurately quantify the stability of bright and dark solitons, we adapt general tools from the theory of perturbed Hamiltonian systems. We show that stationary solitons must be centered in one of the constant regions of the piecewise-constant nonlinearity. We find both stable and unstable configurations for bright solitons and show that all dark solitons are unstable, with different instability mechanisms that depend on the soliton location. We corroborate our analytical results with numerical computations.

Comments
This is the prepublished version harvested from ArXiv. The published version is located at http://pra.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v78/i1/e013611
Pages
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Citation Information
AS Rodrigues, PG Kevrekidis, MA Porter, DJ Frantzeskakis, et al.. "Matter-wave solitons with a periodic, piecewise-constant scattering length" PHYSICAL REVIEW A Vol. 78 Iss. 1 (2008)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/panos_kevrekidis/51/