Traveling supersolid stripe patterns in spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensates

Abstract

We consider a traveling supersolid stripe pattern in a spin-orbit-coupled Bose gas. This configuration is associated with an unequal population of the two single-particle energy minima, giving rise to a chemical potential difference that sets the fringe velocity. Unlike stationary stripes, the moving pattern is spin-polarized, with decreasing contrast as the population imbalance increases, eventually leading to stripe melting and transition to the uniform plane-wave phase. The Bogoliubov spectrum of the moving stripes exhibits asymmetry under inversion of the excitation quasimomentum. At high population imbalance, we identify energetic and dynamical instabilities in the spin-phonon mode which transforms to the roton mode of the plane-wave phase as the stripe structure vanishes.