Supersolid-like solitons in spin-orbit coupled spin-2 condensate

TL;DR

This paper investigates various supersolid-like crystalline structures in a spin-orbit coupled spin-2 condensate, revealing how different phases and interaction strengths lead to diverse soliton patterns and lattice formations.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive mean-field analysis of supersolid-like solitons in spin-2 condensates, detailing how spin-orbit coupling and interactions produce multiple novel density patterns.

Findings

Multiple soliton types identified at different SO-coupling strengths.

Emergence of stripe, triangular, square, and superstripe phases.

Ground states vary with interaction parameters and SO-coupling strength.

Abstract

We study supersolid-like crystalline structures emerging in the stationary states of a quasi-two-dimensional spin-orbit (SO)-coupled spin-2 condensate in the ferromagnetic, cyclic, and antiferro-magnetic phases by solving a mean-field model.Interplay of different strengths of SO coupling and interatomic interactions gives rise to a variety of non-trivial density patterns in the emergent solutions. For small SO-coupling strengths $\gamma$ ($\gamma \approx 0.5$), the ground state is an axisymmetric multi-ring soliton for polar, cyclic and weakly-ferromagnetic interactions, whereas for stronger-ferromagnetic interactions a circularly-asymmetric soliton emerges as the ground state.Depending on the values of interaction parameters, with an increase in SO-coupling strength, a stripe phase may also emerge as the ground state for polar and cyclic interactions. For intermediate values of SO-coupling strength ($\gamma \approx 1$), in addition to these solitons, one could have a quasi-degenerate triangular-lattice soliton in all magnetic phases. On further increasing the SO-coupling strength ($\gamma \gtrapprox 4$), a square-lattice and a superstripe soliton emerge as quasi-degenerate states. The emergence of all these solitons can be inferred from a study of solutions of the single-particle Hamiltonian.