Details

Solitons are approximately stable waves that behave as quasi-particles; only for a few cases the equations of motion in the Bohm approach are fully integrable. A notable case is the solitary wave solution of an effective one-dimensional (1D) Bose–Einstein condensate treated by the causal interpretation [1]. The effective Gross–Pitaevskii equation with a harmonic potential, applied here, is:

, where is the complex conjugate, , and , …. The solitary solution can be written:

with .

In the eikonal representation of the complex-valued wave , the gradient of the phase is the particle velocity. This is a linear function with respect to , from which the equation of motion is derived by solving: , where the analytic solution is given by , with the integration constant . The initial positions are distributed linearly around the point with . It may appear that the presence of the term in the amplitude and in the velocity term of the soliton will lead to singularities at finite times (). The velocity field is multivalued and infinite at these times. With the potential , the Gross–Pitaevskii equation is the nonlinear analog of the Schrödinger equation.

I am grateful to Detlef Dürr and his collaborator Dustin Lazarovici for helpful suggestions.

References

[1] S. Rajendran, P. Muruganandam, and M. Lakshmanan, "Bright and Dark Solitons in a Quasi 1D Bose–Einstein Condensates Modelled by 1D Gross–Pitaevskii Equation with Time-Dependent Parameters," Physica D, 239, 2010 pp. 366–386 or arXiv:0812.5073[nlin.PS].

[2] P. Holland, The Quantum Theory of Motion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

[3] B-G. Englert, M. O. Scully, G. Sussman, and H. Walther, "Surrealistic Bohm Trajectories," Zeitschrift für Naturforschung, 47a, 1992 pp. 1175–1186.