768 research outputs found
Creating solitons by means of spin-orbit coupling
This mini-review collects theoretical results predicting the creation of
matter-wave solitons by the pseudo-spinor system of Gross-Pitaevskii equations
(GPEs) with the self-attractive cubic nonlinearity and linear
first-order-derivative terms accounting for the spin-orbit coupling (SOC). In
one dimension (1D), the so predicted bright solitons are similar to their
well-known counterparts supported by the GPE in the absence of SOC. Completely
novel results were recently obtained for 2D and 3D systems: SOC suppresses the
collapse instability of the multidimensional GPE, creating fully stable 2D
ground-state solitons and metastable 3D ones of two types: semi-vortices (SVs),
with vorticities m = 1 in one spin component and m = 0 in the other, and mixed
modes (MMs), with m = 0 and m = (+/-)1 present in both components. With the
Galilean invariance broken by SOC, moving solitons exist up to a certain
critical velocity, suffering delocalization above it. The newest result
predicts stable 2D "quantum droplets" of the MM type in the presence of the
Lee-Huang-Yang corrections to the GPE system, induced by quantum fluctuations
around the mean-field states, in the case when the inter-component attraction
dominates over the self-repulsion in each component.Comment: a slightly shortened version will be published as an invited
mini-review (perspective) in EP
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