Sammendrag
We consider a two-component Bose-Einstein condensate with and without synthetic “spin-orbit” interactions in two dimensions. Density and phase fluctuations of the condensate are included, allowing us to study the impact of thermal fluctuations and density-density interactions on the physics originating with spin-orbit interactions. In the absence of spin-orbit interactions, we find that intercomponent density interactions deplete the minority condensate. The thermally driven phase transition is driven by coupled density and phase-fluctuations, but is nevertheless shown to be a phase-transition in the Kosterlitz-Thouless universality class with close to universal amplitude ratios irrespective of whether both the minority- and majority condensates exist in the ground state, or only one condensate exists. In the presence of spin-orbit interactions we observe three separate phases, depending on the strength of the spin-orbit coupling and intercomponent density-density interactions: a phase-modulated phase with uniform amplitudes for small intercomponent interactions, a completely imbalanced, effectively single-component condensate for intermediate spin-orbit coupling strength and sufficiently large intercomponent interactions, and a phase-modulated and amplitude-modulated phase for sufficiently large values of both the spin-orbit coupling and the intercomponent density-density interactions. The phase that is modulated by a single q -vector only is observed to transition into an isotropic liquid through a strong depinning transition with periodic boundary conditions, which weakens with open boundaries.
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