English

Experimental realization of a superfluid stripe phase in a spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensate enabled by momentum-space hopping

Quantum Gases 2019-06-05 v1 Atomic Physics

Abstract

In the past few decades, the search for supersolid-like phases has attracted great attention in condensed matter and ultracold atom communities. Here we experimentally demonstrate a route for realizing a superfluid stripe-phase in a spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensate by employing a weak optical lattice to induce momentum-space hopping between two spin-orbit band minima. We characterize the striped ground state as a function of lattice coupling strength and spin-orbit detuning and find good agreement with mean-field simulations. We observe coherent Rabi oscillations in momentum space between two band minima and demonstrate a long lifetime of the ground state. Our work offers an exciting new and stable experimental platform for exploring superfluid stripe-phases and their exotic excitations, which may shed light on the properties of supersolid-like states.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1809.01208,
  title  = {Experimental realization of a superfluid stripe phase in a spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensate enabled by momentum-space hopping},
  author = {Thomas M. Bersano and Junpeng Hou and Sean Mossman and Vandna Gokhroo and Xi-Wang Luo and Kuei Sun and Chuanwei Zhang and Peter Engels},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.01208},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

9 Pages, 6 figures