Polaritonic solitons in a Bose-Einstein condensate trapped in a soft optical lattice

Guangjiong Dong*, Jiang Zhu, Weiping Zhang, Boris A. Malomed

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

30 Scopus citations

Abstract

We investigate the ground state (GS) of a collisionless Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) trapped in a soft one-dimensional optical lattice (OL), which is formed by two counterpropagating optical beams perturbed by the BEC density profile through the local-field effect (LFE). We show that LFE gives rise to an envelope-deformation potential, a nonlocal potential resulting from the phase deformation, and an effective self-interaction of the condensate. As a result, stable photon-atomic (polaritonic) lattice solitons, including an optical component, in the form of the deformation of the soft OL, in a combination with a localized matter-wave component, are generated in the blue-detuned setting, without any direct interaction between atoms. These self-trapped modes, which realize the system's GS, are essentially different from the gap solitons supported by the interplay of the OL potential and collisional interactions between atoms. A transition to tightly bound modes from loosely bound ones occurs with the increase of the number of atoms in the BEC.

Original languageEnglish
Article number250401
JournalPhysical Review Letters
Volume110
Issue number25
DOIs
StatePublished - 17 Jun 2013

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