No Arabic abstract
By developing a hydrodynamic formalism, we investigate the expansion dynamics of the single-minimum phase of a binary spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensate, after releasing from an external harmonic trap. We find that the expansion of the condensate along the direction of the spin-orbit coupling is dramatically slowed down near the transition between the single-minimum phase and the plane-wave phase. Such a slow expansion, resembling a form of an effective localization, is due to the quenching of the superfluid motion which results in a strong increase of the effective mass. In the single-minimum phase the anisotropic expansion of the Bose gas, which is spin balanced at equilibrium, is accompanied by the emergence of a local spin polarization. Our analytic scaling solutions emerging from hydrodynamic picture are compared with a full numerical simulation based on the coupled Gross-Pitaevskii equations.
We investigate the collective excitations of a Raman-induced spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensate confined in a quasi one-dimension harmonic trap using the Bogoliubov method. By tuning the Raman coupling strength, three phases of the system can be identified. By calculating the transition strength, we are able to classify various excitation modes that are experimentally relevant. We show that the three quantum phases possess distinct features in their collective excitation properties. In particular, the spin dipole and the spin breathing modes can be used to clearly map out the phase boundaries. We confirm these predictions by direct numerical simulations of the quench dynamics that excites the relevant collective modes.
We study the spin squeezing in a spin-1/2 Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) with Raman induced spin-orbit coupling (SOC). Under the condition of two-photon resonance and weak Raman coupling strength, the system possesses two degenerate ground states, using which we construct an effective two-mode model. The Hamiltonian of the two-mode model takes the form of the one-axis-twisting Hamiltonian which is known to generate spin squeezing. More importantly, we show that the SOC provides a convenient control knob to adjust the spin nonlinearity responsible for spin squeezing. Specifically, the spin nonlinearity strength can be tuned to be comparable to the two-body density-density interaction, hence is much larger than the intrinsic spin-dependent interaction strength in conventional two-component BEC systems such as $^{87}$Rb and $^{23}$Na in the absence of the SOC. We confirm the spin squeezing by carrying out a fully beyond-mean-field numerical calculation using the truncated Wigner method. Additionally, the experimental implementation is also discussed.
We study topologically non-trivial excitations of a weakly interacting, spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensate in a two-dimensional square optical lattice, a system recently realized in experiment [W. Sun et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 150401 (2018)]. We focus on situations where the system is not subjected to a Zeeman field and thus does not exhibit nontrivial single-particle band topology. Of special interest then is the role of particle interaction as well as its interplay with the symmetry properties of the system in producing topologically non-trivial excitations. We find that the non-interacting system possesses a rich set of symmetries, including the $mathcal{PT}$ symmetry, the modified dihedral point group symmetry $tilde D_4$ and the nonsymmorphic symmetry. These combined symmetries ensure the existence of pairs of degenerate Dirac points at the edge of Brillouin zone for the single-particle energy bands. In the presence of particle interaction and with sufficient spin-orbit coupling, the atoms condense in a ground state with net magnetization which spontaneously breaks the $mathcal{PT}$ and $tilde D_4$ symmetry. We demonstrate that this symmetry breaking leads to a gap opening at the Dirac point for the Bogoliubov spectrum and consequentially topologically non-trivial excitations. We confirm the non-trivial topology by calculating the Chern numbers of the lowest excitation bands and show that gapless edge states form at the interface of systems characterized by different values of the Chern number.
We consider a spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate with Rashba spin-orbit coupling and dipole-dipole interaction confined in a cigar-shaped trap. Due to the combined effects of spin-orbit coupling, dipole-dipole interaction, and trap geometry, the system exhibits a rich variety of ground-state spin structures, including twisted spin vortices. The ground-state phase diagram is determined with respect to the strengths of the spin-orbit coupling and dipole-dipole interaction.
We report the spin texture formation resulting from the magnetic dipole-dipole interaction in a spin-2 $^{87}$Rb Bose-Einstein condensate. The spinor condensate is prepared in the transversely polarized spin state and the time evolution is observed under a magnetic field of 90 mG with a gradient of 3 mG/cm using Stern-Gerlach imaging. The experimental results are compared with numerical simulations of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, which reveals that the observed spatial modulation of the longitudinal magnetization is due to the spin precession in an effective magnetic field produced by the dipole-dipole interaction. These results show that the dipole-dipole interaction has considerable effects even on spinor condensates of alkali metal atoms.