Solitons and Josephson-type oscillations in Bose-Einstein condensates with spin-orbit coupling and time-varying Raman frequency

Abstract

The existence and dynamics of solitons in quasi-one-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensates with spin-orbit coupling (SOC) and attractive two-body interactions are described for two coupled atomic pseudospin components with slowly and rapidly varying time-dependent Raman frequency. By varying the Raman frequency linearly in time, it was shown that ordinary nonlinear Schr\"odinger-type bright solitons can be converted to striped bright solitons, and vice versa. The internal Josephson oscillations between atom number of the coupled soliton components and the corresponding center-of-mass motion are studied for different parameter configurations. In this case, a mechanism to control the soliton parameters is proposed by considering parametric resonances, which can emerge when using time-varying Raman frequencies. Full-numerical simulations confirm variational analysis predictions when applied to the region where regular solitons are expected. In the limit of high frequencies, the system is described by a time-averaged Gross-Pitaevskii formalism with renormalized nonlinear and SOC parameters and modified phase-dependent nonlinearities. By comparing full-numerical simulations with averaged results, we have also studied the lower limits for the frequency of Raman oscillations in order to obtain stable soliton solutions.