Supersolid Striped Droplets in a Raman Spin-Orbit-Coupled System

TL;DR

This paper investigates how quantum fluctuations stabilize and induce novel phases in a Raman spin-orbit-coupled system, leading to self-bound, striped droplet solutions with experimentally accessible properties.

Contribution

It demonstrates the stabilization of droplets by quantum fluctuations and characterizes their properties using an extended Gross-Pitaevskii approach, including an approximate energy functional.

Findings

Quantum fluctuations stabilize the system against collapse.

Identification of self-bound, striped droplet solutions.

Estimation of critical number for droplet binding.

Abstract

We analyze the role played by quantum fluctuations on a Raman Spin-Orbit Coupled system in the stripe phase. We show that beyond mean-field effects stabilize the collapse predicted by mean-field theory and induce the emergence of two phases: a gas and a liquid, which also show spatial periodicity along a privileged direction. We show that the energetically favored phase is determined by the Raman coupling and the spin-dependent scattering lengths. We obtain the ground-state solution of the finite system by solving the extended Gross-Pitaevskii equation and find self-bound, droplet-like solutions that feature internal structure through a striped pattern. We estimate the critical number for binding associated to these droplets and show that their value is experimentally accessible. We report an approximate energy functional in order to ease the evaluation of the Lee-Huang-Yang correction in practical terms.