Abstract
We will discuss our recent realization of a Townes soliton in a two-component rubidium Bose gas. This soliton is a solution of the two-dimensional nonlinear Schrödinger equation with particular properties. It appears, for a given interaction strength, at a specific atom number and is scale invariant. While its realization with a single-component gas requires attractive interactions between the atoms, we use here a mixture of two immiscible components with repulsive interactions. In this case, the behavior of a minority component in the bath constituted by the majority component is equivalent to the single-component attractive case. We use optical imprinting of spin textures on a planar gas to create this soliton and observe its original characteristics.
