Resonant scattering of matter wave gap-solitons by optical lattice defects

Abstract: The physical mechanism underlying scattering properties of matter wave gap-solitons by linear optical lattice defects is investigated. The occurrence of repeated reflection, transmission and trapping regions for increasing strengths of an optical lattice defect are shown to be due to impurity modes inside the defect potential with chemical potentials and numbers of atoms matching corresponding quantities of an incoming gap-soliton. For gap-solitons with chemical potentials very close to band edges, the number of resonances observed in the scattering coincides with the number of bound states which can exist in the defect potential for the given defect strength. The dependence of the positions and widths of the transmission resonant on the incoming gap-soliton velocities are investigated by means of a defect mode analysis and effective mass theory. The comparisons with direct integrations of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation provide a very good agreement confirming the correctness of our interpretation. The possibility of multiple resonant transmission through arrays of optical lattice defects is also demonstrated. In particular, we show that it is possible to design the strength of the defects so to balance the velocity detunings and to allow the resonant transmission through a larger number of defects. The possibility of using these results for very precise gap-soliton dynamical filters is suggested.