Josephson physics of spin-orbit coupled elongated Bose-Einstein condensates

Abstract

We consider an ultracold bosonic binary mixture confined in a one-dimensional double-well trap. The two bosonic components are assumed to be two hyperfine internal states of the same atom. We suppose that these two components are spin-orbit coupled between each other. We employ the two-mode approximation starting from two coupled Gross-Pitaevskii equations and derive a system of ordinary differential equations governing the temporal evolution of the inter-well population imbalance of each component and that between the two bosonic species. We study the Josephson oscillations of these spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates by analyzing the interplay between the interatomic interactions and the spin-orbit coupling and the self-trapped dynamics of the inter-species imbalance. We show that the dynamics of this latter variable is crucially determined by the relationship between the spin-orbit coupling, the tunneling energy, and the interactions.