Spatiotemporal Bloch states of a spin–orbit coupled Bose–Einstein condensate in an optical lattice*

Abstract

Abstract We study the spatiotemporal Bloch states of a high-frequency driven two-component Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) with spin–orbit coupling (SOC) in an optical lattice. By adopting the rotating-wave approximation (RWA) and applying an exact trial-solution to the corresponding quasistationary system, we establish a different method for tuning SOC via external field such that the existence conditions of the exact particular solutions are fitted. Several novel features related to the exact states are demonstrated; for example, SOC leads to spin–motion entanglement for the spatiotemporal Bloch states, SOC increases the population imbalance of the two-component BEC, and SOC can be applied to manipulate the stable atomic flow which is conducive to control quantum transport of the BEC for different application purposes.