Abstract

We model the formation of bright atomic solitons due to collapse of Bose-Einstein condensates with attractive interactions reported by S. L. Cornish et al., [Phys. Rev. Lett. 96 170401 (2006)] in a realistic three dimensional situation. We show that mean-field theory does not adequately explain the experiment, while the inclusion of quantum fluctuations gives rise to bright soliton formation at the appropriate time scales. The solitons are produced either in-phase or out-of-phase and their number increases with the strength of the attractive interaction.

© 2007 Optical Society of America