Formation of matter-wave soliton trains by modulational instability

Understand

Nonlinear systems can exhibit a rich set of dynamics that are inherently sensitive to their initial conditions.

• One such example is modulational instability, which is believed to be one of the most prevalent instabilities in nature.
• By exploiting a shallow zero-crossing of a Feshbach resonance, we characterize modulational instability and its role in the formation of matter-wave soliton trains from a Bose-Einstein condensate.
• We examine the universal scaling laws exhibited by the system, and through real-time imaging, address a long-standing question of whether the solitons in trains are created with effectively repulsive nearest neighbor interactions, or rather, evolve into such a structure.