Directly determining the relative phase of two coherent solitary waves in attractive Bose-Einstein condensates

Abstract

We study the dynamic structure factor of two coherent bright solitary waves in attractive Bose- Einstein condensates confined in a harmonic trap. We demonstrate that the wave function of the two solitary waves with a fixed relative phase shows interference in momentum space. The fringes are shifted depending on the values of the phase. This momentum interference can be extracted from the dynamic structure factor of the system using stimulated two-photon Bragg scattering. Thus our method provides a way to measure the relative phase directly.