Symmetry breaking in dipolar matter-wave solitons in dual-core couplers

We study the effects of spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) in solitons composed of a dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate trapped in a dual-core system with dipole-dipole interactions (DDIs) and hopping between the cores. Two realizations of such a matter-wave coupler are introduced: weakly and strongly coupled. The former is based on two parallel pipe-shaped traps, whereas the latter is represented by a single pipe sliced by an external field into parallel layers. The dipoles are oriented along the axes of the pipes. In these systems, the dual-core solitons feature SSB of the supercritical and subcritical types, respectively. Stability regions are identified for symmetric and asymmetric solitons and nonbifurcating antisymmetric solitons, as well as for symmetric flat states, which may also be stable in the strongly coupled system due to competition between the attractive and repulsive intracore and intercore DDIs. The effects of the contact interactions are considered too. Collisions between moving asymmetric solitons in the weakly symmetric system feature an elastic rebound, a merger into a single breather, and passage accompanied by excitation of intrinsic vibrations of the solitons for small, intermediate, and large collision velocities, respectively. A PT-symmetric version of the weakly coupled system is considered briefly, which may be relevant for matter-wave lasers. Stability boundaries for PT-symmetric and -antisymmetric solitons are identified.