Raman-induced Spin-orbit Coupling Research Articles

Vector rogue waves in spin-1 Bose–Einstein condensates with spin–orbit coupling

Abstract We analytically and numerically study three-component rogue waves (RWs) in spin-1 Bose–Einstein condensates with Raman-induced spin–orbit coupling (SOC). Using the multiscale perturbative method, we obtain approximate analytical solutions for RWs with positive and negative effective masses, determined by the effective dispersion of the system. The solutions include RWs with smooth and striped shapes, as well as higher-order RWs. The analytical solutions demonstrate that the RWs in the three components of the system exhibit different velocities and their maximum peaks appear at the same spatiotemporal position, which is caused by SOC and interactions. The accuracy of the approximate analytical solutions is corroborated by comparison with direct numerical simulations of the underlying system. Additionally, we systematically explore existence domains for the RWs determined by the baseband modulational instability (BMI). Numerical simulations corroborate that, under the action of BMI, plane waves with random initial perturbations excite RWs, as predicted by the approximate analytical solutions.

Intrinsic squeezing of mechanical motion of a harmonically trapped atom with spin-orbit coupling

In this paper we investigated one-dimensional harmonically trapped atom with Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling by mapping to quantum-like model. Using displacement Fock states in quantum optics and variational methods we found the odd-parity superposition state of left- and right-displaced oscillator state is a good approximate solution to the ground state, which captures the essential physics of the system. The ground state wave function owes nodes which is remarkably different from the conventional no-node theory in quantum mechanics. The results show the atomic motion of center of mass exhibits intrinsic squeezing properties with relation to the Raman and spin-orbit coupling strength characterized by the variance in position and momentum, information entropy, as well as the Wigner function of the ground state. The dynamics of center of mass are also studied which demonstrates intuitive Zitterbewegung oscillations in momentum space and real space. Our results could be used for observing Zitterbewegung oscillations in neutral atomic gases and engineering nonclassic states.

Observation of Momentum Space Josephson Effects in Weakly Coupled Bose-Einstein Condensates.

The momentum space Josephson effect describes the supercurrent flow between weakly coupled Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) at two discrete momentum states. Here, we experimentally observe this exotic phenomenon using a BEC with Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling, where the tunneling between two local band minima is implemented by the momentum kick of an additional optical lattice. A sudden quench of the Raman detuning induces coherent spin-momentum oscillations of the BEC, which is analogous to the ac Josephson effect. We observe both plasma and regular Josephson oscillations in different parameter regimes. The experimental results agree well with the theoretical model and numerical simulation and showcase the important role of nonlinear interactions. We also show that the measurement of the Josephson plasma frequency gives the Bogoliubov zero quasimomentum gap, which determines the mass of the corresponding pseudo-Goldstone mode, a long-sought phenomenon in particle physics. The observation of momentum space Josephson physics offers an exciting platform for quantum simulation and sensing utilizing momentum states as a synthetic degree.

The dynamical stripes in spin–orbit coupled Bose–Einstein condensates with Josephson junctions

The Josephson dynamics of the Bose–Einstein condensation with Raman-induced spin–orbit coupling is investigated. A quasi-1D trap is divided into two reservoirs by an optical barrier. Before the tunneling between the reservoirs is turned on, the system stays in its equilibrium ground state, which displays a rich phase diagram for different spin–orbit coupling parameters and interaction strengths. In this work we focus on the plane wave phase and the stripe phase. Our calculation shows that, when the tunneling is turned on, the plane wave phase evolves into a dynamical stripe phase, that is, the density of the particle changes from uniform to periodically modulated. Basically, this stripe is described by a sine function and the wave length, the amplitude and the initial phase of the function are all varying with time. If the system stays in stripe phase initially, the stripes become “sliding” when the tunneling is turned on, which reflects the running of one of the phases of the wave function.

Quantum phases of rotating Raman spin–orbit-coupled dipolar Bose–Einstein condensates with Lee–Huang–Yang correction

We investigate the ground-state phases and spin textures of rotating binary dipolar Bose–Einstein condensates with Lee–Huang–Yang (LHY) correction and Raman-induced spin–orbit coupling (SOC) in a harmonic trap. Without rotation and SOC, the enhanced LHY correction can lead to structural phase transitions of the system. In the presence of SOC, a phase diagram as a function of the Raman coupling and LHY correction strengths is given. It is shown that the system exhibits rich and exotic quantum phases including quantum droplet (QD) phase with hidden vortex–antivortex pairs, droplet-stripe coexistence phase with hidden vortex–antivortex cluster, QD phase with visible triangular vortex lattice, annular stripe phase containing Anderson–Toulouse coreless vortex, and annular phase with vortex–antivortex pair necklace. In particular, for the rotation case, with the variation of Raman coupling strength the system displays complicated ground-state structures, such as layered structure of droplet necklaces and annular stripe with hidden layered vortex necklace and antivortex necklace, toroidal stripe phase with hidden antivortex necklace, and composite phase of visible square antivortex lattice and annular stripe. Furthermore, the system sustains fascinating novel spin textures and skyrmion excitations, including triangular half-antiskyrmion lattice, alternating meron-antimeron necklace, double-layer half-skyrmion necklace, and triangular half-skyrmion lattice.

Bose-Einstein condensates with Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling: An overview

Since their first realization more than a decade ago spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensates have been the subject of intense theoretical and experimental investigations. Spin-orbit coupling deeply modifies the equilibrium properties of the condensate, giving rise to novel configurations such as a supersolid stripe phase and a phase-separated plane-wave state. At the level of dynamics, both the frequency and the nature of the collective modes are significantly affected by the coupling with the spin degree of freedom. Here we review some of the most relevant advances in the field and provide our perspective on possible future research directions.

Superfluid Bose-Fermi mixture with spin-orbit coupling

We investigate a fermionic superfluid with Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate. By minimizing the total free energy, we find that, with moderate repulsive interspecies interaction, a phase separation occurs where the otherwise nontopological uniform phase is divided into two parts: a purely fermionic one and a Bose-Fermi mix characterized by nontrivial topology with the winding number $W=1$. We verify that Majorana zero modes emerge at the phase interfaces by numerical simulations of the coupled Bogoliubov--de Gennes and Gross--Pitaevskii equations in real space. The tunability of the phase interfaces enables a direct manipulation of the predicted Majorana zero modes.

Raman laser induced self-organization with topology in a dipolar condensate.

We investigate the ground states of a dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) subject to Raman laser induced spin-orbit coupling with mean-field theory. Owing to the interplay between spin-orbit coupling and atom-atom interactions, the BEC presents remarkable self-organization behavior and thus hosts various exotic phases including vortex with discrete rotational symmetry, stripe with spin helix, and chiral lattices with C4 symmetry. The peculiar chiral self-organized array of square lattice, which spontaneously breaks both U(1) and rotational symmetries, is observed when the contact interaction is considerable in comparison with the spin-orbit coupling. Moreover, we show that the Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling plays a crucial role in forming rich topological spin textures of the chiral self-organized phases by introducing a channel for atoms to turn on spin flipping between two components. The self-organization phenomena predicted here feature topology owing to spin-orbit coupling. In addition, we find long-lived metastable self-organized arrays with C6 symmetry in the case of strong spin-orbit coupling. We also present a proposal to observe these predicted phases in ultracold atomic dipolar gases with laser-induced spin-orbit coupling, which may stimulate broad theoretical as well as experimental interest.

Detection of roton and phonon excitations in a spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensate with a moving barrier

We propose to detect phonon and roton excitations in a two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate with Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling by perturbing the atomic cloud with a weak barrier. The two excitation modes can be observed by moving the barrier along different directions in appropriate parameter regimes. Phonon excitations are identified by the appearance of solitary waves, while roton excitations lead to distinctive spatial density modulations. We show that this method can also be used to determine the anisotropic critical velocities of superfluid.

Faraday patterns in spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensates

We study the Faraday patterns generated by spin-orbit-coupling induced parametric resonance in a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate with repulsive interaction. The collective elementary excitations of the Bose-Einstein condensate, including density waves and spin waves, are coupled as the result of the Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling and a quench of the relative phase of two Raman lasers without the modulation of any of the system's parameters. We observed several higher parametric resonance tongues at integer multiples of the driving frequency and investigated the interplay between Faraday instabilities and modulation instabilities when we quench the spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensate from zero-momentum phase to plane-wave phase. If the detuning is equal to zero, the wave number of combination resonance barely changes as the strength of spin-orbit coupling increases. If the detuning is not equal to zero after a quench, a single combination resonance tongue will split into two parts.

Itinerant ferromagnetism of a dipolar Fermi gas with Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling

We elucidate the itinerant ferromagnetism of a dipolar Fermi gas with a Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling by investigating the exotic phase diagrams. It is revealed that the dipolar interaction along with spin-orbit coupling can corroborate the formation of ferromagnetism and that the Raman coupling adversely eliminates the tendency to this ferromagnetism transition, which greatly transcends the general understanding of this subject with contact interaction only. We explore the ground states through the density and spin-flip distribution in momentum space. We calculate the transition temperatures well within the reach of an experimental system when altering the dipolar and spin-orbit-coupling strength, which paves a way to the further experimental realization.

Particle and spin transports of spin-orbit-coupled Fermi gases through a quantum point contact

The particle and spin transport through a quantum point contact between two Fermi gases with Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling are investigated. We show that the particle and spin conductances both demonstrate the structure of plateau due to the mesoscopic scale of the quantum point contact. Compared with the normal Fermi gases the particle conductance can be significantly enhanced by the spin-orbit coupling effect. Furthermore, the conversion of the particle and spin currents can take place in the spin-orbit coupled system, and we find that it is controlled by the parameter of two-photon detuning. When the parameter of two-photon detuning vanishes the particle and spin currents decouple.

Stability in turbulence: The interplay between shocks and vorticity in a superfluid with higher-order dispersion

Higher-order dispersion can lead to intriguing dynamics that are becoming a focus of modern hydrodynamics research. Such systems occur naturally, for example in shallow water waves and nonlinear optics, for which several types of novel dispersive shocks structures have been identified. Here we introduce ultracold atoms as a tunable quantum simulations platform for higher-order systems. Degenerate quantum gases are well controlled model systems for the experimental study of dispersive hydrodynamics in superfluids and have been used to investigate phenomena such as vortices, solitons, dispersive shock waves and quantum turbulence. With the advent of Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling, the dispersion of a dilute gas Bose-Einstein condensate can be modified in a flexible way, allowing for detailed investigations of higher-order dispersion dynamics. Here we present a combined experimental and theoretical study of shock structures generated in such a system. The breaking of Galilean invariance by the spin-orbit coupling allows two different types of shock structures to emerge simultaneously in a single system. Numerical simulations suggest that the behavior of these shock structures is affected by interactions with vortices in a manner reminiscent of emerging viscous hydrodynamics due to an underlying quantum turbulence in the system. This result suggests that spin-orbit coupling can be used as a powerful means to tun the effective viscosity in cold-atom experiments serving as quantum simulators of turbulent hydrodynamics, with applications from condensed matter and optics to quantum simulations of neutron stars.

Emergent gauge field and the Lifshitz transition of spin-orbit coupled bosons in one dimension

In the presence of strong spin-independent interactions and spin-orbit coupling, we show that the spinor Bose liquid confined to one spatial dimension undergoes an interaction- or density-tuned quantum phase transition similar to one theoretically proposed for itinerant magnetic solid-state systems. The order parameter describes broken Z2 inversion symmetry, with the ordered phase accompanied by non-vanishing momentum which is generated by fluctuations of an emergent dynamical gauge field at the phase transition. This quantum phase transition has dynamical critical exponent z ≃ 2, typical of a Lifshitz transition, but is described by a nontrivial interacting fixed point. From direct numerical simulation of the microscopic model, we extract previously unknown critical exponents for this fixed point. Our model describes a realistic situation of 1D ultracold atoms with Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling, establishing this system as a platform for studying exotic critical behavior of the Hertz-Millis type.

Dynamics of bright–bright solitons in Bose–Einstein condensate with Raman-induced one-dimensional spin–orbit coupling

We investigate the dynamics of bright–bright solitons in one-dimensional two-component Bose–Einstein condensates with Raman-induced spin–orbit coupling, via the variational approximation and the numerical simulation of Gross–Pitaevskii equations. For the uniform system without trapping potential, we obtain two population balanced stationary solitons. By performing the linear stability analysis, we find a Goldstone eigenmode and an oscillation eigenmode around these stationary solitons. Moreover, we derive a general dynamical solution to describe the center-of-mass motion and spin evolution of the solitons under the action of spin–orbit coupling. The effects of a harmonic trap have also been discussed.

Quantum and thermal fluctuations in a Raman spin-orbit-coupled Bose gas

We theoretically study a three-dimensional weakly-interacting Bose gas with Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling at finite temperature. By employing a generalized Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov theory with Popov approximation, we determine a complete finite-temperature phase diagram of three exotic condensation phases (i.e., the stripe, plane-wave and zero-momentum phases), against both quantum and thermal fluctuations. We find that the plane-wave phase is significantly broadened by thermal fluctuations. The phonon mode and sound velocity at the transition from the plane-wave phase to the zero-momentum phase are thoughtfully analyzed. At zero temperature, we find that quantum fluctuations open an unexpected gap in sound velocity at the phase transition, in stark contrast to the previous theoretical prediction of a vanishing sound velocity. At finite temperature, thermal fluctuations continue to significantly enlarge the gap, and simultaneously shift the critical minimum. For a Bose gas of $^{87}$Rb atoms at the typical experimental temperature, $T=0.3T_{0}$, where $T_{0}$ is the critical temperature of an ideal Bose gas without spin-orbit coupling, our results of gap opening and critical minimum shifting in the sound velocity, are qualitatively consistent with the recent experimental observation {[}S.-C. Ji \textit{et al.}, Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{114}, 105301 (2015){]}.

Exotic topological states with Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling

We propose a simple experimental scheme to realize simultaneously the one-dimensional spin-orbit coupling and the staggered spin-flip in ultracold pseudospin-$1/2$ atomic Fermi gases trapped in square optical lattices. In the absence of interspecies interactions, the system supports gapped Chern insulators and gapless topological semimetal states. By turning on the $s$-wave interactions, a rich variety of gapped and gapless inhomogeneous topological superfluids can emerge. In particular, a gapped topological Fulde-Ferrell superfluid, in which the chiral edge states at opposite boundaries possess the same chirality, is predicted.

Periodic driving control of Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling in Bose-Einstein condensates: The heating mechanisms

We focus on a technique recently implemented for controlling the magnitude of synthetic spin-orbit coupling (SOC) in ultracold atoms in the Raman-coupling scenario. This technique uses a periodic modulation of the Raman-coupling amplitude to tune the SOC. Specifically, it has been shown that the effect of a high-frequency sinusoidal modulation of the Raman-laser intensity can be incorporated into the undriven Hamiltonian via effective parameters, whose adiabatic variation can therefore be used to tune the SOC. Here, we characterize the heating mechanisms that can be relevant to this method. We identify the main mechanism responsible for the heating observed in the experiments as basically rooted in driving-induced transfer of population to excited states. Characteristics of that process determined by the harmonic trapping, the decay of the excited states, and the technique used for preparing the system are discussed. Additional heating, rooted in departures from adiabaticity in the variation of the effective parameters, is also described. Our analytical study provides some clues that may be useful in the design of strategies for curbing the effects of heating on the efficiency of the control methods.

Phase transitions and elementary excitations in spin-1 Bose gases with Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling

We study the ground state phase diagram and the quantum phase transitions in spin-1 Bose gases with Raman induced spin-orbit coupling. In addition to the Bose-Einstein condensates with uniform density, three types of stripe condensation phases that simultaneously break the U(1) symmetry and the translation symmetry are identified. The transitions between these phases are investigated, and the occurrences of the various tricritical points are predicted. The excitation spectra in the plane-wave phase and the zero-momentum phase show rich roton-maxon structures, and their instabilities indicate the tendency to develop the crystalline order. We propose the atomic gas of $^{23}$Na could be a candidate for observing the stripe condensate with high contrast fringes.

Spin–orbit coupled Bose–Einstein condensates with Rydberg-dressing interaction*Project supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2011CB921504) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11104292).

Interaction between Rydberg atoms can be used to control the properties of interatomic interaction in ultracold gases by weakly dressing the atoms with a Rydberg state. Here we investigate the effect of the Rydberg-dressing interaction on the ground-state properties of a Bose–Einstein condensate imposed by Raman-induced spin–orbit coupling. We find that, in the case of SU(2)-invariant s-wave interactions, the gas is only in the plane-wave phase and the zero-momentum phase is absent. In particular, we also predict an unexpected magnetic stripe phase composed of two plane-wave components with unequal weight when s-wave interactions are non-symmetric, which originates from the Rydberg-dressing interaction.