The instabilities beyond modulational type in a repulsive Bose–Einstein condensate with a periodic potential

Abstract

The instabilities of the nontrivial phase elliptic solutions in a repulsive Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) with a periodic potential are investigated. Based on the defocusing nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) equation with an elliptic function potential, the well-known modulational instability (MI), the more recently identified high-frequency instability, and an unprecedented – to our knowledge – variant of the MI, the so-called isola instability are identified numerically. Upon varying parameters of the solutions, instability transitions occur through suitable bifurcations, such as the Hamiltonian-Hopf one. Specifically, (i) increasing the elliptic modulus k of the solutions, we find that MI switches to the isola instability and the dominant disturbance has twice the elliptic wave’s period, corresponding to a Floquet exponent μ=π2K(k). The isola instability arises from the collision of spectral elements at the origin of the spectral plane. (ii) Upon varying V0, the transition between MI and the high-frequency instability occurs. Differently from the MI and isola instability where the collisions of eigenvalues happen at the origin, the high-frequency instability arises from pairwise collisions of nonzero, imaginary elements of the stability spectrum; (iii) In the limit of sinusoidal potential, we show that MI occurs from a collision of eigenvalues with μ=π2K(k) at the origin; (iv) we also examine the dynamic byproducts of the instability in chaotic fields generated by its manifestation. An interesting observation is that, in addition to MI, the isola instability could also lead to dark localized events in the scalar defocusing NLS equation.