Effective spin dynamics of spin-orbit coupled matter-wave solitons in optical lattices

TL;DR

This paper investigates the dynamics of spin-orbit coupled matter-wave solitons in optical lattices, revealing how lattice strength influences spin precession, density oscillations, and nonlinear behaviors including chaos.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of spin dynamics in spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates within optical lattices, highlighting the control of nonlinear behaviors through lattice parameters.

Findings

Optical lattice affects the precessional frequency of spin components.

Spin density exhibits periodic flipping influenced by lattice strength.

Lattice strength can induce transition from periodic to chaotic spin dynamics.

Abstract

We consider matter-wave solitons in spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates embedded in optical lattice and study dynamics of soliton within the framework of Gross-Pitaevskii equations. We express spin components of the soliton pair in terms of nonlinear Bloch equation and investigate effective spin dynamics. It is seen that the effective magnetic field that appears in the Bloch equation is affected by the optical lattices, and thus the optical lattice influences the precessional frequency of the spin components. We make use of numerical approaches to investigate the dynamical behavior of density profiles and center-of-mass of the soliton pair in presence of the optical lattice. It is shown that the spin density is periodically varying due to flipping of spinors between the two states. The amplitude of spin flipping oscillation increases with lattice strength. We find that the system can also exhibit interesting nonlinear behavior for chosen values of parameters. We present a fixed point analysis to study the effects of optical lattices on the nonlinear dynamics of the spin components. It is seen that the optical lattice can act as a control parameter to change the dynamical behavior of the spin components from periodic to chaotic.