Magnetic stripe soliton and localized stripe wave in spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates
Li-Chen Zhao, Xi-Wang Luo, Chuanwei Zhang
Abstract
The recent experimental realization of spin-orbit coupling for ultracold atomic gases opens a new avenue for engineering solitons with internal spatial structures through tuning atomic band dispersions. However, the types of the resulting stripe solitons in a spin-1/2 Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) have been limited to dark-dark or bright-bright with the same density profiles for different spins. Here we propose that general types of stripe solitons, including magnetic stripe solitons (e.g., dark-bright) and localized stripe waves (neither bright nor dark), could be realized in a spin-1 BEC with widely tunable band dispersions through modulating the coupling between three spin states and the linear momentum of atoms. Surprisingly, a moving magnetic stripe soliton can possess both negative and positive effective masses at different velocities, leading to a zero-mass soliton at certain velocity. Our work showcases the great potential of realizing novel types of solitons through band dispersion engineering, which may provide a new approach for exploring soliton physics in many physical branches.