Self-accelerating matter waves

Abstract

The free particle Schrödinger equation admits a nontrivial self-accelerating Airy wave packet solution. Recently, the Airy beams that freely accelerate in space was experimentally realized in photonics community. Here, we present self-accelerating waves for the Bose–Einstein condensate in a time-dependent harmonic oscillator potential. We show that parity and time reversal symmetries for self-accelerating waves are spontaneously broken.