TY - JOUR T1 - Soliton dynamics of an atomic spinor condensate on a Ring Lattice JF - Physical Review A Y1 - 2013 A1 - Indubala I Satija A1 - Carlos L. Pando A1 - Eite Tiesinga AB - We study the dynamics of macroscopically-coherent matter waves of an ultra-cold atomic spin-one or spinor condensate on a ring lattice of six sites and demonstrate a novel type of spatio-temporal internal Josephson effect. Using a discrete solitary mode of uncoupled spin components as an initial condition, the time evolution of this many-body system is found to be characterized by two dominant frequencies leading to quasiperiodic dynamics at various sites. The dynamics of spatially-averaged and spin-averaged degrees of freedom, however, is periodic enabling an unique identification of the two frequencies. By increasing the spin-dependent atom-atom interaction strength we observe a resonance state, where the ratio of the two frequencies is a characteristic integer multiple and the spin-and-spatial degrees of freedom oscillate in "unison". Crucially, this resonant state is found to signal the onset to chaotic dynamics characterized by a broad band spectrum. In a ferromagnetic spinor condensate with attractive spin-dependent interactions, the resonance is accompanied by a transition from oscillatory- to rotational-type dynamics as the time evolution of the relative phase of the matter wave of the individual spin projections changes from bounded to unbounded. VL - 87 UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.5851v1 CP - 3 J1 - Phys. Rev. A U5 - 10.1103/PhysRevA.87.033608 ER -