Spontaneous Parity--Time Symmetry Breaking and Stability of Solitons in Bose-Einstein Condensates

Abstract: We report explicitly a novel family of exact PT-symmetric solitons and further study their spontaneous PT symmetry breaking, stabilities and collisions in Bose-Einstein condensates trapped in a PT-symmetric harmonic trap and a Hermite-Gaussian gain/loss potential. We observe the significant effects of mean-field interaction by modifying the threshold point of spontaneous PT symmetry breaking in Bose-Einstein condensates. Our scenario provides a promising approach to study PT-related universal behaviors in non-Hermitian quantum system based on the manipulation of gain/loss potential in Bose-Einstein condensates.