Compacton existence and spin-orbit density dependence in Bose-Einstein condensates

Abstract

We demonstrate the existence of compactons matter waves in binary mixtures of Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) trapped in deep optical lattices (OL) subjected to equal contributions of intra-species Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling (SOC) under periodic time modulations of the intra-species scattering length. We show that these modulations lead to the rescaling of the SOC parameters that involve the density imbalance of the two components. This gives rise to a density-dependent SOC parameters strongly influence the existence and stability of compacton matter waves. The stability of SOC-compactons is investigated both by linear stability analysis and by time integrations of the coupled Gross-Pitaevskii equations. We find that SOC restricts the parameter ranges for stable stationary SOC-compacton existence but, on the other side, it gives a more stringent signature of their occurrence. In particular, SOC-compactons should appear when the intra-species interactions and the number of atoms in the two components are perfectly balanced (or close to being balanced for metastable cases). The possibility to use SOC-compactons as a tool for indirect measurements of the number of atoms and/or the intra-species interactions, is also suggested.