• DOI:10.1103/PhysRevA.84.043640
• Corpus ID: 119121797

Fluctuating and dissipative dynamics of dark solitons in quasicondensates

@article{Cockburn2011FluctuatingAD,
  title={Fluctuating and dissipative dynamics of dark solitons in quasicondensates},
  author={Stuart P. Cockburn and Hector E. Nistazakis and Theodoros P. Horikis and P. G. Kevrekidis and N. P. Proukakis and Dimitri J. Frantzeskakis},
  journal={Physical Review A},
  year={2011},
  volume={84},
  pages={043640}
}

• S. Cockburn, H. Nistazakis, +3 authors D. Frantzeskakis
• Published 19 July 2011
• Physics
• Physical Review A

The fluctuating and dissipative dynamics of matter-wave dark solitons within harmonically trapped, partially condensed Bose gases is studied both numerically and analytically. A study of the stochastic Gross-Pitaevskii equation, which correctly accounts for density and phase fluctuations at finite temperatures, reveals dark-soliton decay times to be lognormally distributed at each temperature, thereby characterizing the previously predicted long-lived soliton trajectories within each ensemble of numerical realizations [S. P. Cockburn et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 174101 (2010)]. Expectation values for the average soliton lifetimes extracted from these distributions are found to agree well with both numerical and analytic predictions based upon the dissipative Gross-Pitaevskii model (with the same ab initio damping). Probing the regime for which 0.8 k{sub B}T<{mu}<1.6 k{sub B}T, we find average soliton lifetimes to scale with temperature as {tau}{approx}T{sup -4}, in agreement with predictions previously made for the low-temperature regime k{sub B}T<<{mu}. The model is also shown to capture the experimentally relevant decrease in the visibility of an oscillating soliton due to the presence of background fluctuations.