2021/03/02 by B. Bakkali-Hassani, C. Maury, Y. -Q. Zou +6 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.quant-gas #nlin.PS #physics.atom-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.127.023603
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 023603 (2021)
arxiv created 2021/03/02 · arxiv updated 2021/07/14
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 behaviour for a specific value of gN and arbitrary sizes, a hallmark of scale invariance.