Spin dynamics of cold fermions with synthetic spin-orbit coupling

TL;DR

This paper investigates spin relaxation in cold Fermi gases with synthetic spin-orbit coupling, revealing how experiments can measure spin drag rates and identifying regimes of ballistic and reversible spin relaxation.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical analysis linking experimental observations to spin drag rates and explores new regimes of spin dynamics in cold Fermi gases with synthetic spin-orbit coupling.

Findings

Experiments can directly measure the collisional spin drag rate.

Ballistic dynamics dominate in recent experiments, enabling reversible spin relaxation.

Conditions for observing spin drag effects are established.

Abstract

We consider spin relaxation dynamics in cold Fermi gases with a pure-gauge spin-orbit coupling corresponding to recent experiments. We show that such experiments can give a direct access to the collisional spin drag rate, and establish conditions for the observation of spin drag effects. In the recent experiments the dynamics is found to be mainly ballistic leading to new regimes of reversible spin relaxation-like processes.