Dynamical preparation of stripe states in spin-orbit coupled gases

In spinor Bose-Einstein condensates, spin-changing collisions are a remarkable proxy to coherently realize macroscopic many-body quantum states. These processes have been, e.g., exploited to generate entanglement, to study dynamical quantum phase transitions, and proposed for realizing nematic phases in atomic condensates. In the same systems dressed by Raman beams, the coupling between spin and momentum induces a spin dependence in the scattering processes taking place in the gas. Here we show that, at weak couplings, such modulation of the collisions leads to an effective Hamiltonian which is equivalent to the one of an artificial spinor gas with spin-changing collisions that are tunable with the Raman intensity. By exploiting this dressed-basis description, we propose a robust protocol to coherently drive the spin-orbit-coupled condensate into the ferromagnetic stripe phase via crossing a quantum phase transition of the effective low-energy model in an excited state.

cold atoms and matter waves; dynamical phase transitions; quantum phase transitions; spin-orbit coupling

Dynamical preparation of stripe states in spin-orbit coupled gases Articles