Visible stripe phases in spin–orbital-angular-momentum coupled Bose–Einstein condensates

Abstract

Recently, stripe phases in spin–orbit coupled Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs) have attracted much attention since they are identified as supersolid phases. In this paper, we exploit experimentally reachable parameters and show that annular stripe phases with large stripe spacing and high stripe contrast can be achieved in spin–orbital-angular-momentum coupled (SOAMC) BECs. In addition to using Gross–Pitaevskii numerical simulations, we develop a variational ansatz that captures the essential interaction effects to first order, which are not present in the ansatz employed in previous literature. Our work should open the possibility towards directly observing stripe phases in SOAMC BECs in experiments.

Keywords

• spin–orbit coupling
• Bose–Einstein condensate
• supersolid
• stripe phase