Construction of quantum dark soliton in one-dimensional Bose gas

Abstract

Dark soliton solutions in the one-dimensional classical nonlinear Schrödinger equation have been considered to be related to the yrast states corresponding to the type-II excitations in the Lieb–Liniger model. However, the relation is nontrivial and remains unclear because a dark soliton localized in space breaks the translation symmetry, while yrast states are translationally invariant. In this work, we construct a symmetry-broken quantum soliton state and investigate the relation to the yrast states. By interpreting a quantum dark soliton as a Bose–Einstein condensation to the wave function of a classical dark soliton, we find that the quantum soliton state has a large weight only on the yrast states, which is analytically proved in the free-boson limit and numerically verified in the weak-coupling regime. By extending these results, we derive a parameter-free expression of a quantum soliton state that is written as a superposition of yrast states with Gaussian weights. The density profile of this quantum soliton state excellently agrees to that of the classical dark soliton. The dynamics of a quantum dark soliton are also studied, and it turns out that the density profile of a dark soliton decays, but the decay time increases as the inverse of the coupling constant in the weak-coupling limit.