In spinor Bose-Einstein condensates, spin-changing collisions are a remarkable proxy to coherently realize macroscopic many-body quantum states. These processes have been, e.g., exploited to generate entanglement, to study dynamical quantum phase transitions, and proposed for realizing nematic phases in atomic condensates. In the same systems dressed by Raman beams, the coupling between spin and momentum induces a spin dependence in the scattering processes taking place in the gas. Here we show that, at weak couplings, such modulation of the collisions leads to an effective Hamiltonian which is equivalent to the one of an artificial spinor gas with spin-changing collisions that are tunable with the Raman intensity. By exploiting this dressed-basis description, we propose a robust protocol to coherently drive the spin-orbit-coupled condensate into the ferromagnetic stripe phase via crossing a quantum phase transition of the effective low-energy model in an excited state.
In spinor Bose-Einstein condensates, spin-changing collisions are a remarkable proxy to coherently realize macroscopic many-body quantum states. These processes have been, e.g., exploited to generate entanglement, to study dynamical quantum phase transitions, and proposed for realizing nematic phases in atomic condensates. In the same systems dressed by Raman beams, the coupling between spin and momentum induces a spin dependence in the scattering processes taking place in the gas. Here we show that, at weak couplings, such modulation of the collisions leads to an effective Hamiltonian which is equivalent to the one of an artificial spinor gas with spin-changing collisions that are tunable with the Raman intensity. By exploiting this dressed-basis description, we propose a robust protocol to coherently drive the spin-orbit-coupled condensate into the ferromagnetic stripe phase via crossing a quantum phase transition of the effective low-energy model in an excited state.
Excited-state quantum phase transitions depend on and reveal the structure of the whole spectrum of many-body systems. While they are theoretically well understood, finding suitable signatures and detecting them in actual experiments remains challenging. For instance, in spinor gases, excited-state phases have been identified and characterized through a topological order parameter that is challenging to measure in experiments. Here we propose the Raman-dressed spin-orbit-coupled gas as a novel platform to explore excited-state quantum phase transitions. In a weakly coupled regime, the dressed system is equivalent to a spinor gas with tunable spin-spin interactions. Through this equivalence we are able to identify excited-state phases in the Raman-dressed Bose gas. The phases are characterized by the behavior of the spatial density modulations, or stripes, induced by spin-orbit coupling, and can in principle be measured in current state-of-the-art experiments with ultracold atoms. Conversely, we show that the properties of the excited phase can be exploited to prepare stripe states with large and stable density modulations.
We propose and analyze a quantum interferometry scheme based on a Raman-dressed Bose gas with spin-orbit coupling. In this system, the atom-light coupling mixes spin and momentum degrees of freedom, giving rise, in the low-energy regime, to an effective spinor condensate whose spin-mixing interaction can be tuned independently of the atomic density. This controllability enables a separation between state preparation and phase imprinting, and provides a natural route to echo-type protocols based on effective time reversal. Within this framework, critical regimes of the effective spinor Hamiltonian can be used to generate entanglement and enhance interferometric sensitivity beyond the standard quantum limit. In addition, the spin-momentum locking of the dressed modes gives access to spatial density modulations that provide an alternative readout of the interferometric phase. In particular, phase information can be extracted from the displacement of spin-orbit-induced density stripes even when conventional spin observables are insensitive within the effective spinor description. Our results identify Raman-dressed spinor gases as a flexible platform for nonlinear atomic interferometry, combining controllable spin-mixing dynamics with spatially resolved phase readout.
The recently realized spin-orbit-coupled quantum gases [Lin et al., Nature (London) 471, 83 (2011); Wang et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 095301 (2012); Cheuk et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 095302 (2012)] mark a breakthrough in the cold atom community. In these experiments, two hyperfine states are selected from a hyperfine manifold to mimic a pseudospin-1/2 spin-orbit-coupled system by the method of Raman dressing, which is applicable to both bosonic and fermionic gases. In this paper, we show that the method used in these experiments can be generalized to create any large pseudospin spin-orbit-coupled gas if more hyperfine states are coupled equally by the Raman lasers. As an example, we study, in detail, a quantum gas with three hyperfine states coupled by the Raman lasers and show, when the state-dependent energy shifts of the three states are comparable, triple-degenerate minima will appear at the bottom of the band dispersions, thus, realizing a spin-1 spin-orbit-coupled quantum gas. A novel feature of this three-minima regime is that there can be two different kinds of stripe phases with different wavelengths, which has an interesting connection to the ferromagnetic and polar phases of spin-1 spinor Bose-Einstein condensates without spin-orbit coupling.
We theoretically establish the mean-field phase diagram of a homogeneous spin-1, spin-orbit-coupled Bose gas as a function of the spin-dependent interaction parameter, the Raman coupling strength, and the quadratic Zeeman shift. We find that the interplay between spin-orbit coupling and spin-dependent interactions leads to the occurrence of ferromagnetic or ferronematic phases which also break translational symmetry. For weak Raman coupling, increasing attractive spin-dependent interactions (as in 87Rb or 7Li) induces a transition from a uniform to a stripe XY ferromagnet (with no nematic order). For repulsive spin-dependent interactions (as in 23Na), however, we find a transition from an XY spin spiral phase ($\ensuremath{\langle}{S}_{z}\ensuremath{\rangle}=0$ and uniform total density) with uniaxial nematic order to a biaxial ferronematic, where the total density, spin vector, and nematic director oscillate in real space. We investigate the stability of these phases against the quadratic Zeeman effect, which generally tends to favor uniform phases with either ferromagnetic or nematic order but not both. We discuss the relevance of our results to ongoing experiments on spin-orbit-coupled, spinor Bose gases.
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.
We realize the dynamical 1D spin-orbit coupling (SOC) of a Bose-Einstein condensate confined within an optical cavity. The SOC emerges through spin-correlated momentum impulses delivered to the atoms via Raman transitions. These are effected by classical pump fields acting in concert with the quantum dynamical cavity field. Above a critical pump power, the Raman coupling emerges as the atoms superradiantly populate the cavity mode with photons. Concomitantly, these photons cause a backaction onto the atoms, forcing them to order their spin-spatial state. This SOC-inducing superradiant Dicke phase transition results in a spinor-helix polariton condensate. We observe emergent SOC through spin-resolved atomic momentum imaging and temporal heterodyne measurement of the cavity-field emission. Dynamical SOC in quantum gas cavity QED, and the extension to dynamical gauge fields, may enable the creation of Meissner-like effects, topological superfluids, and exotic quantum Hall states in coupled light-matter systems.