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

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.

Department

Physics and Astronomy

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