Impact of higher-order nonlinearity on modulational instability in two-component Bose-Einstein condensates

Interplay between spin-orbit couplings and residual interatomic interactions in the modulational instability of two-component Bose-Einstein condensates

The nonlinear dynamics induced by the modulation instability (MI) of a binary mixture in an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is investigated theoretically under the joint effects of higher-order residual nonlinearities and helicoidal spin-orbit (SO) coupling in a regime of unbalanced chemical potential. The analysis relies on a system of modified coupled Gross-Pitaevskii equations on which the linear stability analysis of plane-wave solutions is performed, from which an expression of the MI gain is obtained. A parametric analysis of regions of instability is carried out, where effects originating from the higher-order interactions and the helicoidal spin-orbit coupling are confronted under different combinations of the signs of the intra- and intercomponent interaction strengths. Direct numerical calculations on the generic model support our analytical predictions and show that the higher-order interspecies interaction and the SO coupling can balance each other suitably for stability to take place. Mainly, it is found that the residual nonlinearity preserves and reinforces the stability of miscible pairs of condensates with SO coupling. Additionally, when a miscible binary mixture of condensates with SO coupling is modulationally unstable, the presence of residual nonlinearity may help soften such instability. Our results finally suggest that MI-induced formation of stable solitons in mixtures of BECs with two-body attraction may be preserved by the residual nonlinearity even though the latter enhances the instability.

Negative compressibility of a nonequilibrium nonideal Bose-Einstein condensate

An ideal equilibrium Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is usually considered in the grand canonical (μVT) ensemble, which implies the presence of the chemical equilibrium with the environment. However, in most experimental scenarios, the total amount of particles in BEC is determined either by the initial conditions or by the balance between dissipation and pumping. As a result, BEC may possess the thermal equilibrium but almost never the chemical equilibrium. In addition, many experimentally achievable BECs are non-ideal due to interaction between particles. In the recent work [Shiskov et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 128, 065301 (2022)0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.128.065301], it has been shown that invariant subspaces in the system Hilbert space appear in non-equilibrium BEC in the fast thermalization limit. In each of these subspaces, Gibbs distribution is established with a certain number of particles that makes it possible to investigate properties of non-ideal non-equilibrium BEC independently in each invariant subspace. In this work, we analyze the BEC stability due to change in dispersion curve caused by non-linearity in BEC. Generally, non-linearity leads to the redshift or blueshift of the dispersion curve and to the change in the effective mass of the particles. We show that the redshift of the dispersion curve can lead to the negative compressibility of BEC and onset of instability, whereas the change in the effective mass always makes BEC more stable. We find the explicit condition for the particle density in BEC, at which the negative compressibility appears. We show that the appearance of BEC instability is followed by the formation of stable and spatially inhomogeneous BEC.