In the context of Gross-Pitaevskii theory, we investigate the unconventional Bose-Einstein condensations in the two-species mixture with
p-wave symmetry in the second band of a bipartite optical lattice. An imaginary-time propagation method is developed to numerically determine the
p-orbital condensation. Different from the single-species case, the two-species boson mixture exhibits two nonequivalent complex condensates in the intraspecies-interaction-dominating regime, exhibiting the vortex-antivortex lattice configuration in the charge and spin channels, respectively. When the interspecies interaction is tuned across the SU(2) invariant point, the system undergoes a quantum phase transition toward a checkerboardlike spin-density wave state with a real-valued condensate wave function. The influence of lattice asymmetry on the quantum phase transition is addressed. Finally, we present a phase-sensitive measurement scheme for experimentally detecting the unconventional Bose-Einstein condensation in our model.
We perform a theoretical study on the recently observed unconventional Bose-Einstein condensations (UBEC) in the high bands of optical lattices. These exotic states are characterized by complex-valued condensate wave functions with nodal points or real-valued wave functions with nodal lines; thus, they are beyond the ``no-node'' theorem of conventional BECs. A quantum phase transition is driven by the competition between the single-particle band and interaction energies. The complex UBECs spontaneously break time-reversal symmetry, exhibiting a vortex-antivortex lattice structure.
Mott insulator to superfluid phase transitions and unconventional superfluid phases in spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensate in one dimensional, square and hexagonal optical lattices are investigated using decoupling approximation and variational Gutzwiller wave function. We considered a system with two components. In the first part, we used decoupling approximation along side perturbation to chart the phase diagrams of the system in the absence of spin-orbit coupling. Our results show that the occupation number of the species, interspecies interaction and the ratio of the hopping matrix of the species dictate the critical point and the separation of the insulating phases. Applying decoupling approximation to spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensate in one dimensional optical we find that spin-orbit coupling reduces the phase boundary of Mott insulator-superfluid transition and also modifies the critical point in a way that the critical point reduces as the coupling strength increases. In the second part, we applied the variational Gutzwiller wave function to spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensate in square and hexagonal lattice. Our results show that the geometry of the optical lattice plays a role in the transition. We find that the mean-field Mott insulator-superfluid phase transition boundary of hexagonal lattice is smaller than that of square lattice for the same system. Finally, we showed that the Gutzwiller variational approach gives us access to the twisted superfluid phase realized in the system. The nonuniformity of the superfluid phase is different for the two lattices.