Approach for making visible and stable stripes in a spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein superfluid

The striped phase exhibited by a spin-1/2 Bose-Einstein condensate with spin-orbit coupling is characterized by the spontaneous breaking of two continuous symmetries: gauge and translational symmetry. This is a peculiar feature of supersolids and is the consequence of interaction effects. We propose an approach to produce striped configurations with high-contrast fringes, making their experimental detection in atomic gases a realistic perspective. Our approach, whose efficiency is directly confirmed by three-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii simulations, is based on the space separation of the two spin components into a two-dimensional bilayer configuration, causing the reduction of the effective interspecies interaction and the increase of the stability of the striped phase. We also explore the effect of a pi/2 Bragg pulse, causing the increase of the fringe wavelength, and of a pi/2 rf pulse, revealing the coherent nature of the order parameter in the spin channel.