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arXiv:2506.22198 · Physical Review A

Chiral quantum droplet in a spin-orbit-coupled Bose gas

Tianqi Luo, Xiaoling Cui

Published Sep 22, 2025• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We report the formation of the chiral quantum droplet in a spin-orbit-coupled Bose gas, where the system turns to a self-bound droplet when moving towards a particular direction and remains gaseous otherwise. The chirality arises from the breaking of Galilean invariance by spin-orbit coupling, which enables the system to dynamically adjust its condensation momentum and spin polarization in response to its velocity. As a result, only towards a specific moving direction and beyond a critical velocity, the acquired spin polarization can trigger collective interactions sufficient for self-binding and drive a first-order transition from gas to droplet. We map out a phase diagram of the droplet, gas, and their coexistence for realistic spin-orbit-coupled $^{39}\mathrm{K}$ mixtures with tunable moving velocity and magnetic detuning. Our results reveal the emergence of chirality in spin-orbit-coupled quantum gases, which shed light on general chiral phenomena in moving systems with broken Galilean invariance.

DOI
10.1103/8nvh-541r

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We report the formation of the chiral quantum droplet in a spin-orbit-coupled Bose gas, where the system turns to a self-bound droplet when moving towards a particular direction and remains gaseous otherwise. The chirality arises from the breaking of Galilean invariance by spin-orbit coupling, which enables the system to dynamically adjust its condensation momentum and spin polarization in response to its velocity. As a result, only towards a specific moving direction and beyond a critical velocity, the acquired spin polarization can trigger collective interactions sufficient for self-binding and drive a first-order transition from gas to droplet. We map out a phase diagram of the droplet, gas, and their coexistence for realistic spin-orbit-coupled 39K^{39}\mathrm{K}39K mixtures with tunable moving velocity and magnetic detuning. Our results reveal the emergence of chirality in spin-orbit-coupled quantum gases, which shed light on general chiral phenomena in moving systems with broken Galilean invariance.
Self-bound quantum droplets form when the mean-field tendency of the gas to collapse is stabilized by the effectively repulsive beyond-mean-field fluctuations. The beyond-mean-field effects depend on Rabi frequency ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{R}$ and quadratic Zeeman effect qqq for the Rabi-coupled Bose mixtures and the spinor gases, respectively. For a quantum droplet, the effects of varying ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{R}$ and qqq have recently been examined only for unpolarized Rabi-coupled Bose mixtures and unpolarized spinor gases. In this paper, we theoretically explore the stability of the droplet phase for polarized Rabi-coupled Bose mixtures and polarized spinor gases. We calculate the beyond-mean-field corrections for both gases with polarized order parameters and obtain the phase diagram of the droplets on the parameter space of Rabi frequency ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{R}$ and detuning $\ensuremath{\delta}$ for Rabi-coupled mixtures and quadratic Zeeman energy qqq and linear Zeeman energy ppp for spinor gases. Finally, we highlight the similarities and differences between the two systems and discuss their experimental feasibility.
We study the static and traveling droplet phases of spin-orbit coupled, one-dimensional Bose-Bose mixtures with a Lee-Huang-Yang correction. For the static droplets, employing a variational analysis for an infinitely extended mixture, we show that the system can feature two ground-state droplet phases: a stripe droplet phase up to a critical Rabi coupling strength, at which it undergoes a first-order transition to a zero-momentum droplet phase. The variational results for the ground-state properties are shown to be in good agreement with numerical solutions for droplets in the thermodynamic limit as well as finite-size droplets in the "flat-top regime". For finite-size droplets, the stripe phase can feature multiple stationary states with different numbers of peaks in their stripe density patterns. The calculation of the excitation spectrum for these stationary states confirms their stability. To study the moving droplets, we investigate the ground-state phases of the system in the droplet's comoving frame. We show that in the comoving frame, droplets acquire a finite longitudinal magnetization. As a consequence, the phase diagram features two distinct phases: a traveling stripe droplet and a plane-wave droplet. The real-time evolution of these droplets in the space-fixed frame, complemented by the Bogoliubov analysis in the comoving frame, illustrates the stability of these traveling droplet phases.
Chirality represents a kind of symmetry breaking characterized by the noncoincidence of an object with its mirror image and has been attracting intense attention in a broad range of scientific areas. The recent realization of spin-orbit coupling in ultracold atomic gases provides a new perspective to study quantum states with chirality. In this Letter, we demonstrate that the combined effects of spin-orbit coupling and interatomic soft-core long-range interaction can induce an exotic supersolid phase in which the chiral symmetry is broken with spontaneous emergence of circulating particle current. This implies that a finite angular momentum can be generated with neither rotation nor effective magnetic field. The direction of the angular momentum can be altered by adjusting the strength of spin-orbit coupling or interatomic interaction. The predicted chiral supersolid phase can be experimentally observed in Rydberg-dressed Bose-Einstein condensates with spin-orbit coupling.
Supersolidity---a coexistence of superfluidity and crystalline or amorphous density variations---has been vividly debated ever since its conjecture. While the initial focus was on helium-4, recent experiments uncovered supersolidity in ultracold dipolar quantum gases. Here we propose a self-bound supersolid phase in a binary mixture of Bose gases with short-range interactions, making use of the nontrivial properties of spin-orbit coupling. We find that a first-order phase transition from a self-bound supersolid stripe phase to a zero-minimum droplet state of the Bose gas occurs as a function of the Rabi coupling strength. These phases are characterized using the momentum distribution, the transverse spin polarization, and the superfluid fraction. The critical point of the transition is estimated in an analytical framework. The predicted density-modulated supersolid stripe and zero-minimum droplet phase should be experimentally observable in a binary mixture of 39K^{39}\mathrm{K}39K with spin-orbit coupling.
The interacting Bose-Einstein condensates are mechanically stabilized by an external confinement such as magnetic, or optical traps. When the confinement is removed, they exhibit an expansion or collapse behavior depending on the interaction being repulsive, or attractive, respectively. The Gross-Pitaevskii mean-field theories are generally sufficient to provide a qualitative understanding of the condensate equilibrium properties and dynamics, therefore, beyond mean-field fluctuations are considered as minor quantitative corrections. The quantum droplet phases are self-stabilized phases of the condensate, in which the attractive mean-field interaction is stabilized by the repulsive Lee-Huang-Yang fluctuations without any external trap. The droplets are studied theoretically for binary Bose mixture and dipolar condensates, and both are recently realized in the ultracold atomic gas experiments. Here we propose the spin-1 condensate as another candidate to exhibit a quantum droplet phase. We argue that the spin-1 condensates in the polar and anti-ferromagnetic order parameters can exhibit a similar self-stabilizing mechanism. We also realize an analogy between the polarized spin-1 and Rabi-coupled binary mixture condensates. The Rabi frequency ωR\omega_RωR​ and quadratic Zeeman energy qqq can tune the Lee-Huang-Yang energy for the Rabi-coupled mixture and spin-1 gas, respectively. Furthermore, the detuning δ\deltaδ and linear Zeeman energy ppp are external parameters to tune the polarization in Rabi-coupled mixture, and spin-1 gas, respectively, which can significantly change the mean-field energy. We create the phase diagram for the mechanical stability of the Rabi-coupled mixture and spin-1 gas on the parameter planes of ωR−δ\omega_R-\deltaωR​−δ and q−pq-pq−p, respectively. We finally address how the Bose mixture quantum droplets respond to the rotation. We find that the strongly confined quantum droplets exhibit triangular vortex lattices under rapid rotation. The properties of the vortex lattices differ from the repulsive condensates in three points. First, the change in the droplet size is only fractional at the rapid rotation limit, unlike the diverging radius of the repulsive condensate. This property can lead the way to realizing the lowest Landau level states and strongly correlated phases in the rotating ultracold gases. Secondly, the change in the core size throughout the vortex lattice is more tractable due to the finite density at the edge of the condensate. Finally, the vortex lattices are slightly distorted, which agrees with the expected vortex density profile due to the nonuniform superfluid density. In the rapid rotation limit, the droplet approaches the flat-top density profile, in which the vortex lattice is closest to a perfect periodicity.
Quantum droplets have aroused much attention recently in view of their successful observations in ultracold homonuclear atoms. In this paper, we demonstrate an alternative mechanism for the formation of quantum droplets in heteronuclear atomic systems, i.e., by applying synthetic spin-orbit coupling (SOC). Taking the Bose-Fermi mixture, for example, we show that by imposing a Rashba SOC between the spin states of fermions such that all fermions occupy the lower helicity branch, the greatly suppressed Fermi pressure can enable the formation of Bose-Fermi droplets even for very weak boson-fermion attractions, which are insufficient to bound a droplet if without SOC. In such SOC-induced quantum droplets, the boson-fermion density ratio universally depends on the SOC strength, and they occur in the mean-field collapsing regime but with a negative fluctuation energy, distinct from the interaction-induced droplets found in literature. The accessibility of these Bose-Fermi droplets in ultracold Cs-Li and Rb-K mixtures is also discussed. Our results shed light on the droplet formation in a vast class of heteronuclear atomic systems through the manipulation of single-particle physics.