Nonlinear Phenomenology from Quantum Mechanics: Soliton in a Lattice

We study a soliton in an optical lattice holding bosonic atoms quantum mechanically using both an exact numerical solution and quantum Monte Carlo simulations. The computation of the state is combined with an explicit account of the measurements of the numbers of the atoms at the lattice sites. In particular, importance sampling in the quantum Monte Carlo method arguably produces faithful simulations of individual experiments. Even though the quantum state is invariant under lattice translations, an experiment may show a noisy version of the localized classical soliton.