Weakly interacting spinor Bose-Einstein condensates with three-dimensional spin-orbit coupling

Abstract

Starting from the Hamiltonian of the second quantization form, the weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensate with spin-orbit coupling of Weyl type is investigated. It is found that the SU(2) nonsymmetric term, i.e., the spin-dependent interaction, can lift the degeneracy of the ground states with respect to the z component of the total angular momentum Jz, casting the ground condensate state into a configuration of zero Jz. This ground state density profile can also be affirmed by minimizing the full Gross-Pitaevskii energy functional. The spin texture of the zero Jz state indicates that it is a knot structure, whose fundamental group is π3(M) ≅ π3(S2) = Z.