Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, USA.
Science. 2017 Apr 28;356(6336):422-426. doi: 10.1126/science.aal3220.
Nonlinear systems can exhibit a rich set of dynamics that are inherently sensitive to their initial conditions. One such example is modulational instability, which is believed to be one of the most prevalent instabilities in nature. By exploiting a shallow zero-crossing of a Feshbach resonance, we characterize modulational instability and its role in the formation of matter-wave soliton trains from a Bose-Einstein condensate. We examine the universal scaling laws exhibited by the system and, through real-time imaging, address a long-standing question of whether the solitons in trains are created with effectively repulsive nearest-neighbor interactions or rather evolve into such a structure.
非线性系统可以表现出丰富的动力学行为，这些行为对初始条件具有固有敏感性。其中一个例子是调制不稳定性，它被认为是自然界中最普遍的不稳定性之一。通过利用费希巴赫共振的浅零点交叉，我们描述了调制不稳定性及其在玻色-爱因斯坦凝聚体中物质波孤子列形成过程中的作用。我们研究了系统表现出的普遍标度定律，并通过实时成像，解决了关于孤子列中的孤子是否是通过有效排斥的最近邻相互作用产生的，还是演变为此种结构的长期存在的问题。
