Surprising results of soliton collisions in a three component Bose Einstein condensate

Abstract

We investigate binary soliton collisions in three component BECs with spin exchange interactions and F = 1. For very special values of the coupling constants, these collisions are known to be elastic. We find that, for a further narrow range of parameters, collisions are almost elastic in the sense that a small amount of energy is lost in the process. Emergent solitons are almost identical to the original ones. However, the generic behaviour, found for most values of the two coupling constants, is very different. We observed the creation of spin component oscillations in both emerging entities. We therefore call these entities oscillatons. They are robust and fit an exact solution of the equations. Thus colliding two solitons can in general, somewhat unexpectedly, result in one of two very different outcomes.