Experimental realization of Peregrine solitons in a Bose-Einstein condensate

Solitons are a hallmark phenomenon of nonlinear dynamics. While a diverse variety of solitons has been considered in physical realizations including BECs, water tanks, optical fibers, plasmas, magnetic materials and more, an intriguing new addition to the family of solitons was found in 1983 by the theoretical discovery of Peregrine solitons as a dynamic solution of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation. These solutions localize in space and time: they emerge out of a background, form a large, pronounced peak, and vanish, making them candidates for possible explanations of rogue waves. This discovery has created a lot of excitement, but their experimental realization has only recently been successful using optical fibers and large water wave tanks.

Here we present, to our knowledge, the first experimental realization of a Peregrine soliton in a dilute-gas BEC. Compared to water tank and optical experiments, our system has very different time and length scales and affords a very rich tool set for the controlled, reproducible creation and detailed investigation of these features. Our experiments are corroborated by one- and three-dimensional matching numerics.

This work opens up a new path towards experimental studies of spatio-temporal solitons.