Tunable nonlinear Landau-Zener tunnelings in a spin-orbit-coupled spinor Bose-Einstein condensate

TL;DR

This paper explores how nonlinear Landau-Zener tunneling occurs in a spin-orbit-coupled spinor Bose-Einstein condensate, revealing tunable nonlinear structures and tunneling behaviors observable through atom population measurements.

Contribution

It introduces a method to stimulate and analyze nonlinear tunneling in a controllable spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensate system, highlighting the effects of nonlinearity and spin-momentum locking.

Findings

Nonlinear structures like tilted cusps and loops form around avoided crossings.

Tunable nonlinearity and gap sizes in dispersion relations.

Time-resolved observation of nonlinear tunneling via atom populations.

Abstract

Nonlinear Landau-Zener tunneling is an important nonlinear phenomenon. We propose to stimulate the nonlinear tunneling in a spin-orbit-coupled spinor Bose-Einstein condensate. The system provides an experimentally tunable nonlinearity as well as multiple avoided crossings with tunable gap size in nonlinear dispersion relations. The nonlinearity generates tilted cusp and loop structures around the avoided crossings, and the physical consequence of these nonlinear structures is the nonlinear Landau-Zener tunneling. The spin-momentum locking induced by the spin-orbit coupling leads to a time-resolved observation of the nonlinear tunneling by measuring atom populations.