Stationary solutions for the1+1nonlinear Schrödinger equation modeling repulsive Bose-Einstein condensates in small potentials

Abstract

Stationary solutions for the 1+1 cubic nonlinear Schrödinger equation modeling repulsive Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) in a small potential are obtained through a form of nonlinear perturbation. In particular, for sufficiently small potentials, we determine the perturbation theory of stationary solutions, by use of an expansion in Jacobi elliptic functions. This idea was explored before in order to obtain exact solutions [Bronski, Carr, Deconinck, and Kutz, Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 1402 (2001)], where the potential itself was fixed to be a Jacobi elliptic function, thereby reducing the nonlinear ODE into an algebraic equation, (which could be easily solved). However, in the present paper, we outline the perturbation method for completely general potentials, assuming only that such potentials are locally small. We do not need to assume that the nonlinearity is small, as we perform a sort of nonlinear perturbation by allowing the zeroth-order perturbation term to be governed by a nonlinear equation. This allows us to consider even poorly behaved potentials, so long as they are bounded locally. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach by considering a number of specific potentials: for the simplest potentials, and we recover results from the literature, while for more complicated potentials, our results are new. Dark soliton solutions are constructed explicitly for some cases, and we obtain the known one-soliton tanh-type solution in the simplest setting for the repulsive BEC. Note that we limit our results to the repulsive case; similar results can be obtained for the attractive BEC case.