Bright solitons and self-trapping with a BEC of cold atoms in driven tilted optical lattices

Abstract

We suggest a method for creating bright matter solitons by loading a BEC of atoms in a driven tilted optical lattice. It is shown that one can realize the self-focussing regime for the wave-packet dynamics by properly adjusting the phase of the driving field with respect to the phase of Bloch oscillations. If atom-atom interactions are larger than some critical value $g_{min}$, this self-focussing regime is followed by the formation of bright solitons. Increasing the interactions above another critical value $g_{max}$ makes this process unstable. Instead of soliton formation one now meets the phenomenon of incoherent self-trapping. In this regime a fraction of atoms is trapped in incoherent localized wave-packets, while the remaining atoms spread ballistically.