Coherent spin mixing via spin-orbit coupling in Bose gases

TL;DR

This paper investigates the complex many-body behavior of spin-1 Bose gases with synthetic spin-orbit coupling, revealing new correlated tunneling phenomena, integrability conditions, and experimental signatures in low-energy regimes.

Contribution

It derives a many-body Hamiltonian incorporating spin-orbit effects, identifies dominant correlated tunneling processes, and explores conditions for integrability and experimental observability.

Findings

Dominant correlated tunneling processes due to spin-orbit coupling

Existence of an integrable regime with spin-dependent dynamics

Experimental signatures observable through quench experiments

Abstract

We study beyond-mean-field properties of interacting spin-1 Bose gases with synthetic Rashba-Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling at low energies. We derive a many-body Hamiltonian following a tight-binding approximation in quasi-momentum space, where the effective spin dependence of the collisions that emerges from spin-orbit coupling leads to dominant correlated tunneling processes that couple the different bound states. We discuss the properties of the spectrum of the derived Hamiltonian and its experimental signatures. In a certain region of the parameter space, the system becomes integrable, and its dynamics becomes analogous to that of a spin-1 condensate with spin-dependent collisions. Remarkably, we find that such dynamics can be observed in existing experimental setups through quench experiments that are robust against magnetic fluctuations.