Loading...
Negative-mass effects in spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates
Colas, David Laussy, Fabrice P. Davis, Matthew J.
Colas, David
Laussy, Fabrice P.
Davis, Matthew J.
Editors
Other contributors
Affiliation
Epub Date
Issue Date
2018-07-31
Submitted date
Subjects
Alternative
Abstract
Negative effective masses can be realized by engineering the dispersion relation of a variety of quantum systems. A recent experiment with spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates has shown that a negative effective mass can halt the free expansion of the condensate and lead to fringes in the density [M. A. Khamehchi et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 155301 (2017)]. Here, we show that the underlying cause of these observations is the self-interference of the wave packet that arises when only one of the two effective mass parameters that characterize the dispersion of the system is negative. We show that spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates may access regimes where both mass parameters controlling the propagation and diffusion of the condensate are negative, which leads to the novel phenomenon of counterpropagating self-interfering packets.
Citation
Publisher
Journal
Research Unit
PubMed ID
PubMed Central ID
Embedded videos
Additional Links
Type
Journal article
Language
en
Description
Series/Report no.
ISSN
0031-9007
1079-7114
1079-7114
EISSN
ISBN
ISMN
Gov't Doc #
Sponsors
EU project polaflow