Josephson effect and self-trapping in helicoidal spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates with optical lattices

Abstract

We consider helicoidal spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates in optical lattices and study the effects of helicoidal gauge potential on the population imbalance between two pseudo-spin states for zero and non-zero Zeeman splitting. We see that the population imbalance executes Josephson-type oscillation for zero Zeeman splitting and the frequency of oscillation increases with the decrease of strength of helicoidal gauge potential. In presence of optical lattices, the frequency further increases. However, the increment of frequency depends on wavenumber of the lattice. For non-zero Zeeman splitting, we find that the oscillation of population imbalance is not symmetric about zero imbalance of the two states. The asymmetry increases with the increase of helicoidal gauge potential and Zeeman splitting. However, it decreases with the increase of initial phase difference.