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Physical Review A

Stationary states of a trapped SU(3) spin-orbit-coupled Bose gas with soft-core interaction

Jia Liu, Jing Feng, Silin Chen, Lin Wen, Wei Han, Xiao-Fei Zhang, Xue-Ying Yang

Published Apr 2, 2025• 7 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We consider a SU(3) spin-orbit-coupled Bose gas with nonlocal soft-core interactions confined in a harmonic trapping potential. The presence of SU(3) spin-orbit coupling induces three minima of the single-particle spectrum. In the absence of spin-exchange interaction, our results show that regardless of the sign of the soft-core interaction, the ground state occupies one single minimum in the momentum space and corresponds to a threefold-degenerate magnetized phase. For the ferromagnetic condensate, the ground state shows an amplitude-modulated plane-wave state, where its modulated amplitude and frequency are related to the strength of the soft-core interaction and SU(3) spin-orbit coupling, respectively. In particular, due to the subtle balance of the soft-core interaction and SU(3) spin-orbit coupling, a stable higher-order spin vortex lattice can be formed in the lattice phase of an antiferromagnetic condensate, where the density distributions of each component and the total system show spatial configurations with threefold and sixfold symmetries, respectively. We also give an experimental protocol to observe such states within current experimental capacity.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.111.043302

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We consider a SU(3) spin-orbit-coupled Bose gas with nonlocal soft-core interactions confined in a harmonic trapping potential. The presence of SU(3) spin-orbit coupling induces three minima of the single-particle spectrum. In the absence of spin-exchange interaction, our results show that regardless of the sign of the soft-core interaction, the ground state occupies one single minimum in the momentum space and corresponds to a threefold-degenerate magnetized phase. For the ferromagnetic condensate, the ground state shows an amplitude-modulated plane-wave state, where its modulated amplitude and frequency are related to the strength of the soft-core interaction and SU(3) spin-orbit coupling, respectively. In particular, due to the subtle balance of the soft-core interaction and SU(3) spin-orbit coupling, a stable higher-order spin vortex lattice can be formed in the lattice phase of an antiferromagnetic condensate, where the density distributions of each component and the total system show spatial configurations with threefold and sixfold symmetries, respectively. We also give an experimental protocol to observe such states within current experimental capacity.
Abstract By numerical propagation of the coupled Gross–Pitaevskii equations, the ground state phase of a SU(3) spin–orbit coupled Bose gas with nonlocal soft-core interactions has been investigated within the all parameter space, showing strong dependence on the strength of SU(3) spin–orbit coupling, nonlocal soft-core interactions, spin-exchange interactions and Rydberg blockade radius. More specially, we also perform a detailed study of the dependence of soft-core interaction on the Rydberg blockade radius at the point of rotational symmetry breaking. Our results show that under the combined effects of such parameters, the ground state shows a threefold-degenerate magnetized state for ferromagnetic spin interaction, while a variety of lattice phases for antiferromagnetic spin interaction.
We consider a SU(3) spin–orbit coupled Bose–Einstein condensate confined in a harmonic plus quartic trap. The ground-state wave functions of such a system are obtained by minimizing the Gross–Pitaevskii energy functional, and the effects of the spin-dependent interaction and spin–orbit coupling are investigated in detail. For the case of ferromagnetic spin interaction, the SU(3) spin–orbit coupling induces a threefold-degenerate plane wave ground state with nontrivial spin texture. For the case of antiferromagnetic spin interaction, the system shows phase separation for weak SU(3) spin–orbit coupling, where three discrete minima with unequal weights in momentum space are selected, while hexagonal honeycomb lattice structure for strong SU(3) SOC, where three discrete minima with equal weights are selected.
Abstract We consider the ground state properties of SU(3) spin–orbit-coupled (SOC) Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs) with soft-core interaction trapped in radially periodic potential. By minimizing the energy of the condensate, the effects of spin–orbit coupling and soft-core long-range interaction on the ground-state structure of such a system have been investigated for ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic spin interaction cases. In the absence of soft-core interaction, our results show that the system has a rich variety of ground state phases, such as typical vortices, antivortices, domain wall and hexagonal vortex lattice. It is found that the spontaneous symmetry breaking and isolated density peaks appear in the system with the addition of soft-core interaction. We illustrate the physical mechanisms of different interactions in SU(3) SOC BECs.
We consider the SU(3) spin–orbit coupled spin-1 Bose–Einstein condensates in a two-dimensional harmonic trap. The competition between the SU(3) spin–orbit coupling and the spin-exchange interaction results in a rich variety of lattice configurations. The ground-state phase diagram spanned by the isotropic SU(3) spin–orbit coupling and the spin–spin interaction is presented. Five ground-state phases can be identified on the phase diagram, including the plane wave phase, the stripe phase, the kagome lattice phase, the stripe-honeycomb lattice phase, and the honeycomb hexagonal lattice phase. The system undergoes a sequence of phase transitions from the rectangular lattice phase to the honeycomb hexagonal lattice phase, and to the triangular lattice phase in spin-1 Bose–Einstein condensates with anisotrpic SU(3) spin–orbit coupling.
We show that double-quantum spin vortices, which are characterized by doubly quantized circulating spin currents and unmagnetized filled cores, can exist in the ground states of SU(3) spin-orbit-coupled Bose gases. It is found that the SU(3) spin-orbit coupling and spin-exchange interaction play important roles in determining the ground-state phase diagram. In the case of effective ferromagnetic spin interaction, the SU(3) spin-orbit coupling induces a threefold degeneracy to the magnetized ground state, while in the antiferromagnetic spin interaction case, the SU(3) spin-orbit coupling breaks the ordinary phase rule of spinor Bose gases and allows the spontaneous emergence of double-quantum spin vortices. This exotic topological defect is in stark contrast to the singly quantized spin vortices observed in existing experiments and can be readily observed by the current magnetization-sensitive phase-contrast imaging technique.
We present a variational study of the spin-1 Bose gases in a harmonic trap with three-dimensional spin–orbit (SO) coupling of Weyl type. For weak SO coupling, we treat the single-particle ground states as the form of perturbational harmonic oscillator states in the lowest total angular momentum manifold with j = 1, m j = 1, 0, −1. When the two-body interaction is considered, we set the trail order parameter as the superposition of three degenerate single-particle ground-states and the weight coefficients are determined by minimizing the energy functional. Two ground state phases, namely the magnetic and the nematic phases, are identified depending on the spin-independent and the spin-dependent interactions. Unlike the non-SO-coupled spin-1 Bose–Einstein condensate for which the phase boundary between the magnetic and the nematic phase lies exactly at zero spin-dependent interaction, the boundary is modified by the SO-coupling. We find the magnetic phase is featured with phase-separated density distributions, 3D skyrmion-like spin textures and competing magnetic and biaxial nematic orders, while the nematic phase is featured with miscible density distributions, zero magnetization and spatially modulated uniaxial nematic order. The emergence of higher spin order creates new opportunities for exploring spin-tensor-related physics in SO coupled superfluid.