Spin-Orbit Coupled Spinor Bose-Einstein Condensates

Understand

An effective spin-orbit coupling can be generated in cold atom system by engineering atom-light interactions.

• In this letter we study spin-1/2 and spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates with Rashba spin-orbit coupling, and find that the condensate wave function will develop non-trivial structures.
• From numerical simulation we have identified two different phases.
• In one phase the ground state is a single plane wave, and often we find the system splits into domains and an array of vortices plays the role as domain wall.