Bloch oscillations in supersolids

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that an impurity in a spin-orbit coupled supersolid exhibits Bloch-like oscillations, with potential mitigation of decay through soliton assumptions, revealing new dynamical behaviors in supersolid systems.

Contribution

It introduces the phenomenon of Bloch oscillations in supersolids with an impurity and analyzes how these oscillations are affected by phonon excitations and soliton properties.

Findings

Impurity motion undergoes Bloch oscillations in a supersolid.

Phonon modes are excited but do not alter the lattice periodicity.

Soliton assumptions can significantly reduce oscillation decay.

Abstract

We show that the motion of an accelerated atomic impurity immersed in a spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensate in the supersolid stripe phase undergoes oscillations, similar to the well-known phenomenon of Bloch oscillations in solids. While the back-action of the oscillatory movement onto the condensate excites phonon modes inside the supersolid, it does not affect the position of the roton minimum and therefore not the periodicity of the matter wave lattice. The ultimate decay of the oscillations is mostly due to the dispersion of the wavepacket and we show that this can be counteracted to a large extent by assuming that the impurity is a bright soliton.