Modulational instability of spinor condensates

We demonstrate, analytically and numerically, that the ferromagnetic phase of the spinor Bose-Einstein condenstate may experience modulational instability of the ground state leading to a fragmentation of the spin domains. Together with other nonlinear effects in the atomic optics of ultracold gases (such as coherent photoassociation and four-wave mixing) this effect provides one more analogy between coherent matter waves and light waves in nonlinear optics.