We study the dynamics of a quasi-two-dimensional (2D) spin-orbit-coupled ferromagnetic Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) under a linear Zeeman magnetic field disturbed by a moving obstacle. The Bogoliubov excitation spectrums and corresponding critical excitations in different situations are analyzed. The structure of the coreless vortex or antivortex generated by the moving obstacle has been investigated. When the Zeeman field is parallel to the 2D system plane, the vortex cores for the three components of a (an) vortex (antivortex) could be arranged into a line which is vertical to the Zeeman field, and their order would be reversed as the spin-orbit coupling increases. When the Zeeman field is perpendicular to the plane, a skyrmionlike vortex ground state could be induced via spin-orbit interaction even by a static obstacle and thus becomes unique in contrast with the scalar BECs or spinor BECs without spin-orbit coupling. This topological structure is also found to be dynamically stable if the obstacle is moving at a relatively small velocity.
We study the dynamics of a quasi-two-dimensional (2D) spin-orbit-coupled ferromagnetic Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) under a linear Zeeman magnetic field disturbed by a moving obstacle. The Bogoliubov excitation spectrums and corresponding critical excitations in different situations are analyzed. The structure of the coreless vortex or antivortex generated by the moving obstacle has been investigated. When the Zeeman field is parallel to the 2D system plane, the vortex cores for the three components of a (an) vortex (antivortex) could be arranged into a line which is vertical to the Zeeman field, and their order would be reversed as the spin-orbit coupling increases. When the Zeeman field is perpendicular to the plane, a skyrmionlike vortex ground state could be induced via spin-orbit interaction even by a static obstacle and thus becomes unique in contrast with the scalar BECs or spinor BECs without spin-orbit coupling. This topological structure is also found to be dynamically stable if the obstacle is moving at a relatively small velocity.
Abstract We investigate the topological excitations of rotating spin-1 ferromagnetic Bose–Einstein condensates with spin–orbit coupling (SOC) in an in-plane quadrupole field. Such a system sustains a rich variety of exotic vortex structures due to the spinor order parameter and the interplay among in-plane quadrupole field, SOC, rotation, and interatomic interaction. For the nonrotating case, with the increase of the quadrupole field strength, the system experiences a transition from a coreless polar-core vortex with a bright soliton to a singular polar-core vortex with a density hole. Without rotation but with a fixed quadrupole field, when the SOC strength increases, the system transforms from a central Mermin–Ho vortex into a criss-crossed vortex–antivortex string lattice. For the rotating case, we give a phase diagram with respect to the quadrupole field strength and the SOC strength. It is shown that the rotating system supports four typical quantum phases: vortex necklace, diagonal vortex chain cluster, single diagonal vortex chain, and few vortex states. Furthermore, the system favors novel spin textures and skyrmion excitations including an antiskyrmion, a criss-crossed half-skyrmion–half-antiskyrmion lattice, a skyrmion-meron necklace, a symmetric half-skyrmion lattice, and an asymmetric skyrmion-meron lattice.
We study the vortex-lattice formation in a rotating Rashba spin-orbit (SO) coupled quasi-two-dimensional (quasi-2D) hyper-fine spin-1 spinor Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in the x-y plane using a numerical solution of the underlying mean-field Gross-Pitaevskii equation. In this case, the non-rotating Rashba SO-coupled spinor BEC can have topological excitation in the form of vortices of different angular momenta in the three components, e.g. the (0, +1, +2)- and (-1, 0, +1)-type states in ferromagnetic and anti-ferromagnetic spinor BEC: the numbers in the parenthesis denote the intrinsic angular momentum of the vortex states of the three components with the negative sign denoting an anti-vortex. The presence of these states with intrinsic vorticity breaks the symmetry between rotation with vorticity along the z and -z axes and thus generates a rich variety of vortex-lattice and anti-vortex-lattice states in a rotating quasi-2D spin-1 spinor ferromagnetic and anti-ferromagnetic BEC, not possible in a scalar BEC. For weak SO coupling, we find two types of symmetries of these states - hexagonal and 'square'. The hexagonal (square) symmetry state has vortices arranged in closed concentric orbits with a maximum of 6, 12, 18… (8, 12, 16…) vortices in successive orbits. Of these two symmetries, the square vortex-lattice state is found to have the smaller energy.
We investigate the dynamics around an obstacle potential moving in the plane-wave state of a pseudospin-1/2 Bose-Einstein condensate with Rashba spin-orbit coupling. We numerically investigate the dynamics of the system and find that it depends not only on the velocity of the obstacle but also significantly on the direction of obstacle motion, both of which are verified by the Bogoliubov analysis. The excitation diagram with respect to the velocity and direction is obtained. The dependence of the critical velocity on the strength of the spin-orbit coupling and the size of the obstacle is also investigated.
Two-component Bose-Einstein condensate offers an ideal platform for investigating many intriguing topological defects due to the interplay between intraspecies and interspecies interactions. The recent realization of spin-orbit coupling in two-component Bose-Einstein condensate, owing to coupling between the spin and the centre-of-mass motion of the atom, provides possibly new opportunities to search for novel quantum states. In particular, the gradient magnetic field in the Bose-Einstein condensate has brought a new way to create topologically nontrivial structures including Dirac monopoles and quantum knots. Previous studies of the gradient magnetic field effect in the Bose-Einstein condensate mainly focused on the three-component case. However, it remains unclear how the gradient magnetic field affects the ground state configuration in the rotating two-component Bose-Einstein condensate with spin-orbit coupling. In this work, by using quasi two-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equations, we study the ground state structure of a rotating two-component Bose-Einstein condensate with spin-orbit coupling and gradient magnetic field. We concentrate on the effects of the spin-orbit coupling and the gradient magnetic field on the ground state. The numerical results show that increasing the strength of the spin-orbit coupling can induce a phase transition from skyrmion lattice to skyrmion chain in the presence of the gradient magnetic field. Unlike the study of skyrmion in rotating two-component Bose-Einstein condensate with only spin-orbit coupling, the skyrmion chain can occur under the isotropic spin-orbit coupling when the gradient magnetic field is considered. It is worth noting that the skyrmion chain here is arrayed along the diagonal direction. Next we examine the effect of the gradient magnetic field on spin-orbit coupled two-component Bose-Einstein condensate. For the case of weak spin-orbit coupling and the slow rotation, a phase transition from a single plane-wave to half-skyrmion is found through increasing magnetic field gradient strength. For the case of strong spin-orbit coupling and the fast rotation, the nature of the ground state is shown to support the formation of a hidden vortex as the gradient magnetic field is enhanced. These hidden vortices have no visible cores in density distributions but have phase singularities in phase distributions, which are arrayed along the diagonal direction. This result confirms a new method of creating the hidden vortices in the two-component Bose-Einstein condensate. These topological structures can be detected by using the time-of-flight absorption imaging technique. Our results illustrate that the gradient magnetic field not only provides an opportunity to explore the exotic topological structures in spin-orbit coupled spinor Bose-Einstein condensate, but also is crucial for realizing the phase transitions among different ground states. This work paves the way for the future exploring of topological defect and the corresponding dynamical stability in quantum systems subjected to a gradient magnetic field.
We systematically investigate the weakly trapped spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates with spin-orbit coupling in an external Zeeman field. We find that the mean-field ground state favors either a magnetized standing-wave phase or plane-wave phase when the strength of the Zeeman field is below a critical value related to the strength of spin-orbit coupling. The Zeeman field can induce a phase transition between standing-wave and plane-wave phases, and we determine the phase boundary analytically and numerically. The magnetization of these two phases responds to the external magnetic field in a very unique manner: the linear Zeeman effect magnetizes the standing-wave phase along the direction of the magnetic field, but the quadratic Zeeman effect demagnetizes the plane-wave phase. When the strength of Zeeman field surpasses the critical value, the system is completely polarized to a ferromagnetic state or polar state with zero momentum.
Static and dynamic properties of vortices in a two-component Bose-Einstein condensate with Rashba spin-orbit coupling are investigated. The mass current around a vortex core in the plane-wave phase is found to be deformed by the spin-orbit coupling, and this makes the dynamics of the vortex pairs quite different from those in a scalar Bose-Einstein condensate. The velocity of a vortex-antivortex pair is much smaller than that without spin-orbit coupling, and there exist stationary states. Two vortices with the same circulation move away from each other or unite to form a stationary state.