2017/09/30 by R. J. Dingwall, M. J. Edmonds, J. L. Helm +2 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.quant-gas #nlin.PS
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1367-2630/aab29e
Updated with minor corrections and additional references. To be published in New J. Phys
arxiv created 2018/02/22 · arxiv updated 2018/05/24
We study interactions between bright matter-wave solitons which acquire chiral transport dynamics due to an optically-induced density-dependent gauge potential. Through numerical simulations, we find that the collision dynamics feature several non-integrable phenomena, from inelastic collisions including population transfer and radiation losses to short-lived bound states and soliton fission. An effective quasi-particle model for the interaction between the solitons is derived by means of a variational approximation, which demonstrates that the inelastic nature of the collision arises from a coupling of the gauge field to velocities of the solitons. In addition, we derive a set of interaction potentials which show that the influence of the gauge field appears as a short-range potential, that can give rise to both attractive and repulsive interactions.