Tunneling Dynamics Between Atomic Bright Solitons

Abstract

We investigate tunneling behavior between two bright solitons in a Bose-Einstein condensate with attractive contact interactions between atoms. The explicit tunneling properties including tunneling particles and oscillation period are described analytically, which indicates that the periodic tunneling form is a nonlinear Josephson type oscillation. The results suggest that the breathing behavior of solitons comes from the tunneling mechanism in an effective double-well potential, which is quite different from the modulational instability mechanism for Akhmediev breather and K-M breather. Furthermore, we obtain a phase diagram for two soliton interaction which admits tunneling property, particle-like property, interference property, and a resonant interaction case. The explicit conditions for them are clarified based on the defined critical distance $d_c$ and spatial interference period $D$.

8 pages, 7 figures