We consider a harmonically trapped rotating spin-1 Bose–Einstein condensate with SU(3) spin–orbit coupling subject to a gradient magnetic field. The effects of SU(3) spin–orbit coupling, rotation, and gradient magnetic field on the ground-state structure of the system are investigated in detail. Our results show that the interplay among SU(3) spin–orbit coupling, rotation, and gradient magnetic field can result in a variety of ground states, such as a vortex ring and clover-type structure. The numerical results agree well with our variational analysis results.
We consider a harmonically trapped rotating spin-1 Bose–Einstein condensate with SU(3) spin–orbit coupling subject to a gradient magnetic field. The effects of SU(3) spin–orbit coupling, rotation, and gradient magnetic field on the ground-state structure of the system are investigated in detail. Our results show that the interplay among SU(3) spin–orbit coupling, rotation, and gradient magnetic field can result in a variety of ground states, such as a vortex ring and clover-type structure. The numerical results agree well with our variational analysis results.
Abstract We study the ground-state phases of two-dimensional rotating spin–orbit coupled spin-1/2 Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs) in a gradient magnetic field. The competition between gradient magnetic field, spin–orbit coupling and rotation leads to a variety of ground-state phase structures. In the weakly rotation regime, as the increase of gradient magnetic field strength, the BECs experiences a phase transition from the unstable phase to the single vortex-line phase. The unstable phase presents the vortex lines structures along the off-diagonal direction. With magnetic field gradient strength increasing, the number of vortex lines changes accordingly. As the magnetic field gradient strength increases further, the single vortex-line phase with a single vortex line along the diagonal direction is formed. The phase diagram shows that the boundary between the two phases is linear with the relative repulsion λ ≥ 1 and is nonlinear with λ < 1. In the relatively strong rotation regime, in addition to the unstable phase and the single vortex-line phase, the vortex-ring phase is formed for the strong magnetic field gradient and rapid rotation. The vortex-ring phase shows the giant and hidden vortex structures at the center of ring. The strong magnetic field gradient makes the number of the vortices around the ring unchanged.
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 investigate the ground states and rich dynamics of vortices in spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) subject to position-dependent detuning. Such a detuning plays the role of an effective rotational frequency, causing the generation of a synthetic magnetic field. Through scanning the detuning gradient, we numerically obtain static vortex lattice structures containing 1 to 6 vortices using the coupled Gross-Pitaevskii equations. When quenching detuning gradient below its initial value, the vortex lattices exhibit interesting periodic rotation motion, and their dynamical stability can persist for up to 1000ms. In particular, depending on the detuning gradient, the twin vortices exhibit either a scissors-like rotational oscillation or a clockwise periodic rotation, reflecting the response to the magnetic field gradient experienced by the condensates. We fit the numerical results to quantitatively analyze the relation between rotation dynamics and magnetic field gradients. When quenching the detuning gradient beyond its initial value, additional vortices appear. Our findings may motivate further experimental studies of vortex dynamics in synthetic magnetic fields and offer insights for engineering a BEC-based magnetic field gradiometer.
The ground-state properties of a spin-orbit-coupled rotating Bose-Einstein condensate with a gradient magnetic field in a toroidal trap are studied. When gradient magnetic fields are taken into account, the results are quite novel in that, in the spin-orbit-coupled nonrotating Bose-Einstein condensate with small gradient magnetic field intensity, the ferromagnetic system presents a plane-wave phase and satisfies the translational symmetry, and the antiferromagnetic system presents a stripe phase. With the increase of the magnetic field intensity, the translational symmetry of the ground state of the ferromagnetic system is broken, and the phase change tends to be similar in both ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic systems. Considering the spin-orbit-coupled rotating Bose-Einstein condensate, the system gradually transforms from the nonsingle half-skyrmion chain to the single half-skyrmion chain with the increase of the gradient magnetic field, while the single half-skyrmion chain transforms to the nonsingle half-skyrmion chain with the increase of spin-orbit coupling. In addition, we obtain the phase diagram as a function of the gradient magnetic field and the spin-orbit-coupling intensity.
We study the topological defects and spin structures of rotating SU(3) spin–orbit-coupled spin F=1 Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs) in an in-plane quadrupole field with ferromagnetic spin interaction, and the BECs is confined by a harmonic trap. Without rotation, as the quadrupole field strength is increased, the spin F=1 BECs with SU(3) spin–orbit coupling (SOC) evolves from the initial Thomas–Fermi phase into the stripe phase; then, it enters a vortex–antivortex cluster state and eventually a polar-core vortex state. In the absence of rotation with the given quadrupole field, the enhancing SU(3) SOC strength can cause a phase transition from a central Mermin–Ho vortex to a vortex–antivortex cluster, subsequently converting to a bending vortex–antivortex chain. In addition, when considering rotation, it is found that this system generates the following five typical quantum phases: a three-vortex-chain cluster structure with mutual angles of approximately 2π3, a tree-fork-like vortex chain cluster, a rotationally symmetric vortex necklace, a diagonal vortex chain cluster, and a density hole vortex cluster. Particularly, the system exhibits unusual topological structures and spin textures, such as a bending half-skyrmion–half-antiskyrmion (meron–antimeron) chain, three half-skyrmion (meron) chains with mutual angles of an approximately 2π3, slightly curved diagonal half-skyrmion (meron) cluster lattice, a skyrmion–half-skyrmion (skyrmion-meron) necklace, and a tree-fork-like half-skyrmion (meron) chain cluster lattice.
We study the ground-state phases of two-dimensional spin-orbit coupled spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate loaded in a plane quadrupole field. In the absence of rotation, for the fixed spin-orbit coupling strength, the ordinary stripe phase is found when the strength of the magnetic field gradient is small. As the strength of magnetic field gradient enhances, the system realizes the phases with three layer vortices along the radial direction. The number of vortices in the second layer is successively increased and the vortices in the outermost layer disappear when the strength of magnetic field gradient surpass the critical value. For the large strength of magnetic field gradient, the system only has the inner layer vortices. The magnetic field inhibits the region of vortices. For the fixed magnetic field gradient strength, the vortices of the system elongate along the radial direction and form a series of vortex lines, the number of the vortex line increases as the strength of spin-orbit coupling enhances. By adding the rotation, for the fixed strengths of spin-orbit coupling and magnetic field gradient, the number of second layer vortices also successively increases as the rotational frequency increases. The number of vortices in the certain layer of the ground-state density can be regularly changed under the effects of the magnetic field and spin-orbit coupling.