Dynamics of spin–orbit-coupled cold atomic gases in a Floquet lattice with an impurity

Abstract

In this work, we have studied the quantum tunneling of a single spin–orbit-coupled atom held in a periodically modulated optical lattice with an impurity. As a result we find that the dynamical localization takes place globally at the collapse points of quasienergy spectrum, even when the impurity potential is far off-resonant with the driving field. Meanwhile, two types of local second-order tunneling processes appear beyond expectation between the two nearest-neighbor sites of the impurity, with the spin unchanged and with the impurity site population negligible. Though tunneling behaviors of the two types seem to be the same, they are believed to involve two distinct mechanisms: one is related to spin-independent process, while the other is to spin-dependent tunneling process. The two types of second-order processes can be identified by means of resonant tunneling with or without spin flipping by tuning the impurity potential to be in resonance with the driving field. In the Floquet picture, the system with the localized impurity develops a fine structure of avoided crossings of quasienergies near the collapse point, which is crucial to understand the so-called second-order tunneling dynamics. These results are confirmed analytically on the basis of effective three-site model and multiple-time-scale asymptotic perturbative method, and may be exploited for engineering the spin-dependent quantum transport in realistic experiments.