Publication Date
2-14-2017
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Volume
114
Issue
10
DOI
10.1073/pnas.1615004114
Abstract
We observed and controlled the Brownian motion of solitons. We launched solitonic excitations in highly elongated 87 Rb Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) and showed that a dilute background of impurity atoms in a different internal state dramatically affects the soliton. With no impurities and in one-dimension (1D), these solitons would have an infinite lifetime, a consequence of integrability. In our experiment, the added impurities scatter off the much larger soliton, contributing to its Brownian motion and decreasing its lifetime. We describe the soliton's diffusive behavior using a quasi-1D scattering theory of impurity atoms interacting with a soliton, giving diffusion coefficients consistent with experiment.
Keywords
soliton, Brownian motion, Bose-Einstein condensate, diffusion, fluctuation, dissipation
Department
Physics and Astronomy
Recommended Citation
Lauren M. Aycock, Hilary M. Hurst, Dimitry K. Efimkin, Dina Genkina, Hsin-I Lu, Victor M. Galitski, and I. B. Spielman. "Brownian motion of solitons in a Bose-Einstein Condensate" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2017). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1615004114
Comments
This is a pre-peer-review version of an article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 114, Issue 10, 2017. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1615004114.