We study matter-wave dark solitons in atomic Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) at finite temperatures, under the effect of linear and periodic potentials. Our model, namely, a dissipative Gross-Pitaevskii equation, is treated analytically by means of dark-soliton perturbation theory and the Landau dynamics approach, which result in a Newtonian equation of motion for the dark-soliton center. This reduced model, which incorporates an effective washboard potential and an antidamping term accounting for finite-temperature effects, constitutes an example of an antidamped Josephson junction. We perform a qualitative (local and global) analysis of the equation of motion. We present results of systematic numerical simulations for both zero- and finite-temperature BECs to highlight the differences between the Hamiltonian and dissipative settings. For sufficiently small wave numbers of the periodic potential and weak linear potentials, the analytical results are found to be in good agreement with pertinent ones obtained via a Bogoliubov–de Gennes analysis and direct numerical simulations.

• Received 12 June 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.86.033616