Abstract. We consider a spin-orbit coupled system of particles in an external trap that is represented by a deformed harmonic oscillator potential. The spin-orbit interaction is a Rashba interaction that does not commute with the trapping potential and requires a full numerical treatment in order to obtain the spectrum. The effect of a Zeeman term is also considered. Our results demonstrate that variable spectral gaps occur as a function of strength of the Rashba interaction and deformation of the harmonic trapping potential. The single-particle density of states and the critical strength for superfluidity vary tremendously with the interaction parameter. The strong variations with Rashba coupling and deformation implies that the few- and many-body physics of spin-orbit coupled systems can be manipulated by variation of these parameters. PACS numbers: 67.85.-d,73.20.At,05.30.Fk,73.22.Dj ar
We consider a two-dimensional system of harmonically trapped particles with pseudo-spin-
21 degree of freedom. This degree of freedom is coupled to the particle's momentum via the so-called Rashba spin-orbit interaction. We present our numerical results for a single-particle and few-particle systems, assuming the repulsive interparticle interaction to be of zero range.
The coupling between the spin degrees of freedom and the orbital angular momentum has a profound effect on the properties of nuclei, atoms, and condensed-matter systems. Recently, synthetic gauge fields have been realized experimentally in neutral cold-atom systems, giving rise to a spin-orbit coupling term with ``strength''
kso. This paper investigates the interplay between the single-particle spin-orbit coupling term of Rashba type and the short-range two-body
s-wave interaction for cold atoms under external confinement. Specifically, we consider two different harmonically trapped two-atom systems. The first system consists of an atom with spin-orbit coupling that interacts with a structureless particle through a short-range two-body potential. The second system consists of two atoms that both feel the spin-orbit coupling term and that interact through a short-range two-body potential. Treating the spin-orbit term perturbatively, we determine the correction to the ground-state energy for various generic parameter combinations. Selected excited states are also treated. An important aspect of our study is that the perturbative treatment is not limited to small
s-wave scattering lengths but provides insights into the system behavior over a wide range of scattering lengths, including the strongly interacting unitary regime. We find that the interplay between the spin-orbit coupling term and the
s-wave interaction generically enters, depending on the exact parameter combinations of the
s-wave scattering lengths, at order
kso2 or
kso4 for the ground state and leads to a shift of the energy of either sign. While the absence of a term proportional to
kso follows straightforwardly from the functional form of the spin-orbit coupling term, the absence of a term proportional to
kso2 for certain parameter combinations is unexpected. The well-known fact that the spin-orbit coupling term couples the relative and center-of-mass degrees of freedom has interesting consequences for the trapped two-particle systems. For example, we find that, for certain parameter combinations, the spin-orbit coupling term turns sharp crossings into avoided crossings with an energy splitting proportional to
kso. Our perturbative results are confirmed by numerical calculations that expand the eigenfunctions of the two-particle Hamiltonian in terms of basis functions that contain explicitly correlated Gaussians.
A system of bosons in a two-dimensional harmonic trap in the presence of Rashba-type spin-orbit coupling is investigated. An analytic treatment of the ground state of a single atom in the weak-coupling regime is presented and used as a basis for a perturbation theory in the interacting two-boson system. The numerical diagonalization of both the single-particle and the two-boson Hamiltonian matrices allows us to go beyond those approximations and obtain not only the ground state, but also the low-energy spectra and the different energy contributions separately. We show that the expectation value of the spin-orbit term is related to the expectation value of ${\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\sigma}}}_{z}{\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{L}}_{z}$ for the eigenstates of the system, regardless of the trapping potential. The low-energy states of the repulsively interacting two-boson system are characterized. In the presence of a sufficiently strong interaction and spin-orbit coupling strength, there is a direct energy-level crossing in the ground state of the system between states of different
Jz, the third component of the total angular momentum, that changes its structure. This is reflected in a discontinuity in the different energy terms and it is signaled in the spatial density of the system.
We introduce a theoretical approach to determine the spin structure of harmonically trapped atoms with two-body zero-range interactions subject to an equal mixture of Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling created through Raman coupling of atomic hyperfine states. The spin structure of bosonic and fermionic two-particle systems with finite and infinite two-body interaction strength
g is calculated. Taking advantage of the fact that the
N-boson and
N-fermion systems with infinitely large coupling strength
g are analytically solvable for vanishing spin-orbit coupling strength
kso and vanishing Raman coupling strength $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Omega}}$, we develop an effective spin model that is accurate to second order in $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Omega}}$ for any
kso and infinite
g. The three- and four-particle systems are considered explicitly. It is shown that the effective spin Hamiltonian, which contains a Heisenberg exchange term and an anisotropic Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya exchange term, describes the transitions that these systems undergo with the change of
kso as a competition between independent spin dynamics and nearest-neighbor spin interactions.
We theoretically study an interacting few-body system of Rashba spin-orbit-coupled two-component Bose gases confined in a harmonic trapping potential. We solve the interacting Hamiltonian at large Rashba coupling strengths using an exact-diagonalization scheme, and obtain the ground-state phase diagram for a range of interatomic interactions and particle numbers. At small particle numbers, we observe that the bosons condense to an array of topological states with
n+1/2 quantum angular momentum vortex configurations, where
n=0,1,2,3,.... At large particle numbers, we observe two distinct regimes: at weaker-interaction strengths, we obtain ground states with topological and symmetry properties that are consistent with mean-field theory computations; at stronger-interaction strengths, we report the emergence of strongly correlated ground states.