https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2010-00146-0
Stability of matter-wave solitons in optical lattices
Department of Physics, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, 731235, India
Corresponding author: a binoy123@bsnl.in
Received:
25
September
2009
Revised:
23
February
2010
Published online:
26
May
2010
We consider localized states of both single- and two-component Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) confined in a potential resulting from the superposition of linear and nonlinear optical lattices and make use of Vakhitov-Kolokolov criterion to investigate the effect of nonlinear lattice on the stability of the soliton solutions in the linear optical lattice (LOL). For the single-component case we show that a weak nonlinear lattice has very little effect on the stability of such solitons while sufficiently strong nonlinear optical lattice (NOL) squeezes them to produce narrow bound states. For two-component condensates we find that when the strength of the NOL (γ1) is less than that of the LOL (V0) a relatively weak intra-atomic interaction (IAI) has little effect on the stability of the component solitons. This is true for both attractive and repulsive IAI. A strong attractive IAI, however, squeezes the BEC solitons while a similar repulsive IAI makes the component solitons wider. For γ1 > V0, only a strong attractive IAI squeezes the BEC solitons but the squeezing effect is less prominent than that found for γ1 < V0. We make useful checks on the results of our semianalytical stability analysis by solving the appropriate Gross-Pitaevskii equations numerically.
© EDP Sciences, Società Italiana di Fisica, Springer-Verlag, 2010