Formation of soliton trains in Bose-Einstein condensates by temporal Talbot effect

Abstract

We study the recent observation of formation of matter-wave soliton trains in Bose-Einstein condensates. We emphasize the role of the box-like confinement of the Bose-Einstein condensate and find that there exist time intervals for the opening the box that support the generation of real solitons. When the box-like potential is switched off outside the existing time windows, the number of peaks in a train changes resembling missing solitons observed in the experiment. Our findings indicate that a new way of generating soliton trains in condensates through the temporal, matter-wave Talbot effect is possible.