Negative-mass effects in spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates

Abstract

Negative effective masses can be realised by engineering the dispersion relation in 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 produce fringes in the density [M. Khamehchi et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 155301 (2017)]. Here, we show that the observed fringes are due to the negativity of only one of the two effective mass parameters that characterise the dispersion, which leads to previously predicted self-interference of the wave packet. We show how confgurations are nevertheless accessible to spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates where both mass parameters controlling the propagation and diffusion of the condensate are negative, resulting in the novel phenomenon of counter-propagating self-interfering packets.

References in corpus (5)

• Quantum-fluid dynamics of microcavity polaritons
• Spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates in a one-dimensional optical lattice
• Negative mass hydrodynamics in a Spin-Orbit--Coupled Bose-Einstein Condensate
• Self-Trapping of Bose-Einstein Condensates in an Optical Lattice: the Effect of the System Dimension
• Superluminal X-waves in a polariton quantum fluid

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