Bose-Einstein Condensates with Spin-Orbit Interaction

Motivated by recent experiments carried out by Spielman’s group at NIST, we study a general scheme for generating families of gauge fields, spanning the scalar, spin-orbit, and non-Abelian regimes. The NIST experiments, which impart momentum to bosons while changing their spin state, can in principle realize all these. In the spin-orbit regime, we show that a Bose gas is a spinor condensate made up of two non-orthogonal dressed spin states carrying different momenta. As a result, its density shows a stripe structure with a contrast proportional to the overlap of the dressed states, which can be made very pronounced by adjusting the experimental parameters.