Quantized transport of solitons in Bose-Einstein condensates driven by spin-orbit coupling

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates quantized soliton transport in Bose-Einstein condensates driven by spin-orbit coupling and optical lattices, highlighting the role of Zeeman splitting in controlling this transport.

Contribution

It introduces a method to realize and control quantized soliton transport in BECs using helicoidal spin-orbit coupling and Zeeman splitting.

Findings

Stable quantized transport occurs for solitons in certain chemical potential ranges.

Transport is suppressed for large atom numbers in the semi-infinite gap.

Zeeman splitting is crucial for enabling quantized transport.

Abstract

We demonstrate that linear and nonlinear Thouless pumping can be realized in two-component elongated Bose-Einstein condensates using helicoidal spin-orbit coupling that slides with respect to a static optical lattice, identical for both spinor components. Stable quantized transport is found for solitons in semi-infinite and finite gaps, within certain intervals of chemical potentials and numbers of atoms. In the semi-infinite gap, the transport is arrested for solitons with sufficiently large number of atoms. We elucidate the important role of Zeeman splitting in the control of quantized transport, which disappears when the longitudinal component of the Zeeman field is removed.