Skyrmion-antiskyrmion pairs in ultracold atomic gases

Published in Physical Review A: Rapid Communication, 2011

Hannah M. Price and Nigel R. Cooper
Phys. Rev. A 83, 061605(R) (2011)

https://journals.aps.org/pra/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevA.83.061605

https://arxiv.org/abs/1102.0340

We study theoretically the dynamics of two-component Bose-Einstein condensates in two dimensions, which admit topological excitations related to the Skyrmions of nuclear physics. We show that there exists a branch of uniformly propagating solitary waves characterised by a conserved momentum. These excitations exhibit a cross-over from spatially extended spin-wave states at low momentum to a localised "spin-wave droplet" at intermediate momentum; at still higher momentum, the configuration evolves continuously into a Skyrmion-antiSkyrmion pair. We discuss how these solitary waves can be generated and studied in experiment.