Dark-bright solitons in Bose–Einstein condensates at finite temperatures

We study the dynamics of dark-bright (DB) solitons in binary mixtures of Bose gases at finite temperature using a system of two coupled dissipative Gross–Pitaevskii equations. We develop a perturbation theory for the two-component system to derive an equation of motion for the soliton centers and identify different temperature-dependent damping regimes. We show that the effect of the bright (‘filling’) soliton component is to partially stabilize ‘bare’ dark solitons against temperature-induced dissipation, thus providing longer lifetimes. We also study analytically thermal effects on DB soliton ‘molecules’ (i.e. two in-phase and out-of-phase DB solitons), showing that they undergo expanding oscillations while interacting. Our analytical findings are in good agreement with results obtained via a Bogoliubov–de Gennes analysis and direct numerical simulations. 3 Author to whom any correspondence should be addressed. New Journal of Physics 14 (2012) 055006 1367-2630/12/055006+23$33.00 © IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft