Bright solitons in a 2D spin-orbit-coupled dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate

Abstract

We study a two-dimensional spin-orbit-coupled dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate with repulsive contact interactions by both the variational method and the imaginary time evolution of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. The dipoles are completely polarized along one direction in the 2D plane so as to provide an effective attractive dipole-dipole interaction. We find two types of solitons as the ground states arising from such attractive interactions: a plane wave soliton with a spatially varying phase and a stripe soliton with a spatially oscillating density for each component. Both types of solitons possess smaller size and higher anisotropy than the soliton without spin-orbit coupling. Finally, we discuss the properties of moving solitons, which are nontrivial because of the violation of Galilean invariance.