Dark solitons revealed in Lieb-Liniger eigenstates

Abstract

We study how dark solitons, i.e. solutions of one-dimensional single-particle nonlinear time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation, emerge from eigenstates of a linear many-body model of contact interacting bosons moving on a ring, the Lieb-Liniger model. This long-standing problem was addressed by various groups, which presented different, seemingly unrelated, procedures to reveal the solitonic waves directly from the many-body model. Here, we propose a unification of these results using a simple Ansatz for the many-body eigenstate of the Lieb-Liniger model, which gives us access to systems of hundreds of atoms. In this approach, mean-field solitons emerge in a single-particle density through repeated measurements of particle positions in the Ansatz state. The post-measurement state turns out to be a wave packet of yrast states of the reduced system.