Timo Eichmann and James R. Anglin:
Phys. Rev. A 104, 043317 (2021)
🔓 arXiv:2104.15089 (2021)
Solitons in general are configurations of extended fields which move like isolated particles. Vector bright solitons can occur in a two-component self-attractive Bose-Einstein condensate. If the components of the condensate have different chemical potentials, the total spin of the soliton can serve as an internal energy depot that makes the soliton into an active particle, able to move against an external force using energy carried within the particle—if there is a dynamical mechanism for steadily transferring energy from soliton spin into soliton motion. Here we present such a dynamical mechanism, embed it in an experimentally feasible way within the larger system of a spinor condensate mean field, and show how the mechanism works to realize a solitonic active particle. In what can be considered a toy model for the project of going beyond toy models for active particles, we test the robustness of the activity mechanism by exploring a range of deformations to the simplest model for embedding the nonlinear mechanism in the condensate system.