We discuss localized ground states of Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC’s) in optical lattices with attractive and repulsive three-body interactions in the framework of a quintic nonlinear Schrödinger equation which extends the Gross-Pitaevskii equation to the one-dimensional case. We use both a variational method and a self-consistent approach to show the existence of unstable localized excitations which are similar to Townes solitons of the cubic nonlinear Schrödinger equation in two dimensions. These solutions are shown to be located in the forbidden zones of the band structure, very close to the band edges, separating decaying states from stable localized ones (gap solitons) fully characterizing their delocalizing transition. In this context the usual gap solitons appear as a mechanism for arresting the collapse in low-dimensional BEC’s in optical lattices with an attractive real three-body interaction. The influence of the imaginary part of the three-body interaction, leading to dissipative effects in gap solitons, and the effect of atoms feeding from the thermal cloud are also discussed. These results may be of interest for both BEC’s in atomic chips and Tonks-Girardeau gas in optical lattices.

• Received 18 April 2005

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.72.033617