Effects of optical lattices on bright solitons in spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates

Abstract

The stationary bright solitons that appear in the ground state of the spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensate (SOC-BEC) exhibit nodes. We consider SOC-BEC in combined linear and nonlinear optical lattices and study their effects on the matter-wave bright soliton and find that the parameters of the nonlinear lattice or atomic scattering length can be judiciously manipulated to have useful control over the nodes of the soliton. It is seen that the soliton with large number of nodes is less stable compared to one having fewer number of nodes. We infer that the synthetic spin-orbit coupling induces instability in the ordinary matter-wave soliton.