Realization of a Townes soliton in a two-component planar Bose gas
Résumé
Most experimental observations of solitons are limited to one-dimensional (1D) situations, where they are naturally stable. For instance, in 1D cold Bose gases, they exist for any attractive interaction strength \g\ and particle number \N\. By contrast, in two dimensions, solitons appear only for discrete values of \gN\, the so-called Townes soliton being the most celebrated example. Here, we use a two-component Bose gas to prepare deterministically such a soliton: Starting from a uniform bath of atoms in a given internal state, we imprint the soliton wave function using an optical transfer to another state. We explore various interaction strengths, atom numbers and sizes, and confirm the existence of a solitonic behaviour for a specific value of \gN\ and arbitrary sizes, a hallmark of scale invariance.