Controlling dark solitons on the healing length scale

Abstract

While usually the optical diffraction limit is setting a limit for the lengthscales on which a typical alkali Bose-Einstein condensate can be controlled, we show that in certain situations control via matter waves can achieve smaller resolutions. For this we consider a small number of impurity atoms which are trapped inside the density dip of a dark soliton state and show that any grey soliton can be obtained by just driving the impurity atoms. By controlling the driving force on the impurity, one can therefore fully control the position and velocity of the dark soliton, and also study controlled collisions between these non-linear objects.