Textures of F = 2 spinor Bose-Einstein condensates with spin-orbit coupling

We study the textures of F = 2 spinor Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) with spin-orbit coupling (SOC) induced by a synthetic non-Abelian gauge field. On the basis of the analysis of the SOC energy and the numerical calculation of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, we demonstrate that the textures originate from the helical modulation of the order parameter (OP) due to the SOC. In particular, the cyclic OP consists of two-dimensional lattice textures, such as the hexagonal lattice and the 1/3 vortex lattice, commonly understandable as the two-dimensional network of the helical modulations.

This is an article published by American Physical Society