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

TL;DR

This paper reports the experimental creation of a superfluid stripe phase in a spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensate using momentum-space hopping induced by a weak optical lattice, providing a new platform to study supersolid-like states.

Contribution

The study demonstrates a novel method to realize and characterize a superfluid stripe phase in ultracold atoms with spin-orbit coupling, aligning experimental results with mean-field theory.

Findings

Observation of a stable superfluid stripe phase.

Detection of coherent Rabi oscillations in momentum space.

Long lifetime of the stripe ground state.

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.