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

Abstract

We consider an ultracold bosonic binary mixture confined in a quasi-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 to 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 interwell population imbalance of each component and of the polarization, which is the imbalance of the total populations of the two species. From this set of equations we disentangle the different macroscopic quantum tunneling and self-trapping scenarios occurring for both population imbalances and the polarization in terms of the interplay between the interatomic interactions and the other relevant energies in the problem, like the spin-orbit coupling or the conventional tunneling term. We find a rich dynamics in all three variables and discuss the experimental feasibility of such a system.