We report on the production of 39 K matter-wave bright solitons, i.e., 1D matter-waves that propagate without dispersion thanks to attractive interactions. The volume of the soliton is studied as a function of the scattering length through three-body losses, revealing peak densities as high as ∼ 5 × 10 20 m −3 . Our solitons, close to the collapse threshold, are strongly bound and will find applications in fundamental physics and atom interferometry.PACS numbers: 03.75. Lm, Solitons are one-dimensional wave-packets that propagate with neither change of shape nor loss of energy. They are a consequence of non-linearities that balance wave-packet spreading due to dispersion. They appear in numerous physical systems such as water waves, optical fibers, plasmas, acoustic waves or even in energy propagation along proteins [1]. Solitons are also observed in ultracold quantum gases [2][3][4][5][6]. In this context, matterwave bright solitons are Bose-Einstein condensates that remain bound thanks to mean-field attractive interactions in a one dimensional geometry [2,3].Matter-wave bright solitons are predicted to be a great tool to locally probe rapidly varying forces for example close to a surface [7,8], or probe (surface) bound states [7,9] which do not appear in linear scattering. For example, the small size of bright solitons has been used in the measurement of quantum reflection from a barrier [10,11]. Because of their dispersion-free propagation, bright solitons are also believed to be good candidates for performing very long time atom interferometry measurements [12] although interactions may cause additional phase shifts [13][14][15][16]. Recently, an experiment demonstrated an increased visibility for a soliton atomic interferometer as compared to its non interacting counterpart [17]. The interactions in solitons can also lead to squeezed or entangled states, which could improve the sensitivity of interferometric measurements beyond the shot noise limit [18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. In some cases, the formation of mesoscopic Schrödinger cat states or NOON states is predicted [25][26][27]. A problem in using these states is losses, such as three-body collisions, which are an intrinsic source of decoherence. They can also induce unusual soliton center of mass dynamics [28].Experiments producing and studying matter-wave bright solitons, despite their interest in both applied and fundamental physics, have remained scarce. In fact, only two elements have been turned into bright solitons, 7 Li [2, 3, 29, 30] and 85 Rb [10,31]. In this paper, we describe the production of 39 K solitons in the |F = 1, m F = −1 state using the Feshbach resonance at 561 G [32] and its associated zero-crossing of the scattering length at 504.4 G (see figure 1). We have optimized the setup in order to produce strongly bound solitons, i.e., solitons with a large negative interaction energy. We thus pro- The evaporation to Bose-Einstein condensation takes place at 550 G (red bullet). The magnetic field is then ramped in two steps to 507 G (vi...