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Splitting and recombination of bright-solitary-matter waves

Wales, Oliver J.; Rakonjac, Ana; Billam, Thomas P.; Helm, John L.; Gardiner, Simon A.; Cornish, Simon L.

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Authors

Oliver J. Wales

Ana Rakonjac

Thomas P. Billam

John L. Helm



Abstract

Atomic Bose–Einstein condensates confined in quasi-1D waveguides can support bright-solitary-matter waves when interatomic interactions are sufficiently attractive to cancel dispersion. Such solitary-matter waves are excellent candidates for highly sensitive interferometers, as their non-dispersive nature allows them to acquire phase shifts for longer times than conventional matter-wave interferometers. In this work, we demonstrate experimentally the splitting and recombination of a bright-solitary-matter wave on a narrow repulsive barrier, realizing the fundamental components of an interferometer. We show that for a sufficiently narrow barrier, interference-mediated recombination can dominate over velocity-filtering effects. Our theoretical analysis shows that interference-mediated recombination is extremely sensitive to the barrier position, predicting strong oscillations in the interferometer output as the barrier position is adjusted over just a few micrometres. These results highlight the potential of soliton interferometry, while putting tight constraints on the barrier stability needed in future experimental implementations.

Citation

Wales, O. J., Rakonjac, A., Billam, T. P., Helm, J. L., Gardiner, S. A., & Cornish, S. L. (2020). Splitting and recombination of bright-solitary-matter waves. Communications Physics, 3, Article 51. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42005-020-0320-8

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Feb 20, 2020
Online Publication Date Mar 13, 2020
Publication Date 2020
Deposit Date Jun 17, 2019
Publicly Available Date Mar 19, 2020
Journal Communications Physics.
Publisher Nature Research
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 3
Article Number 51
DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/s42005-020-0320-8

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.





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