Dark spherical shell solitons in three-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensates: Existence, stability and dynamics

Abstract

In this work we study spherical shell dark soliton states in three-dimensional atomic Bose-Einstein condensates. Their symmetry is exploited in order to analyze their existence, as well as that of topologically charged variants of the structures, and, importantly, to identify their linear stability Bogolyubov-de Gennes spectrum. We compare our effective 1D spherical and 2D cylindrical computations with the full 3D numerics. An important conclusion is that such spherical shell solitons can be stable sufficiently close to the linear limit of the isotropic condensates considered herein. We have also identified their instabilities leading to the emergence of vortex line and vortex ring cages. In addition, we generalize effective particle pictures of lower dimensional dark solitons and ring dark solitons to the spherical shell solitons concerning their equilibrium radius and effective dynamics around it. In this case too, we favorably compare the resulting predictions such as the shell equilibrium radius, qualitatively and quantitatively, with full numerical solutions in 3D.