Matter waves and quantum tunneling engineered by time-dependent interactions

Abstract

We report the possibility of steering gap solitons in Bose-Einstein condensates loaded in optical lattices by means of time-dependent nonlinearities, which allow one to control in a nondestructive manner both Bloch oscillations and Landau-Zener tunneling (i.e., Rabi oscillations) across band gaps. As an example we show how to move a matter-wave soliton in real and in reciprocal space from a lower to higher bands, avoiding dynamical instabilities. This opens the possibility of experimental access to gap solitons of higher bands and forcing of soliton motion through a lattice via the Feshbach resonance technique.