Many-body ground states for bosons with Rashba spin-orbit coupling

ORAL

Abstract

The ground state of $N$ non-interacting bosons with a Rashba dispersion is macroscopically degenerate. It is of fundamental interest---and also relevant to current experiments in cold atomic gases with synthetic spin-orbit coupling---to determine whether a unique ground state is stabilized by interactions and what the properties of such a state might be. Motivated by exact solutions for the two-body problem, we construct many-body bosonic wave functions that saturate the kinetic energy and minimize the interaction energy, and compare with other recently proposed trial ground states.

*W.S.C. and N.T. acknowledge support from NSF DMR-0907275

Authors

  • William Cole

    • Department of Physics, the Ohio State University
  • Shizhong Zhang

    • Department of Physics and Center of Theoretical and Computational Physics, the University of Hong Kong
  • Zhenhua Yu

    • Institute for Advanced Study, Tsinghua University
  • Nandini Trivedi

    • Department of Physics, the Ohio State University
    • The Ohio State University