Orbital Optical Raman Lattice

The spin and orbital are two basic degrees of freedom, which play significant roles in exploring exotic quantum phases in optical lattices with synthetic spin-orbit coupling (SOC) and high orbital bands, respectively. Here, we propose an orbital optical Raman lattice to study exotic high-orbital Bose condensates with Raman-induced SOC in a square lattice. We find that both the SOC and p-orbital interactions influence the condensed state of bosons. Their interplay results in two novel high-orbital many-body quantum phases: the uniform angular momentum superfluid phase, which features a global topological chiral orbital current, and the two-dimensional spin-orbital supersolid phase, which is characterized by the spin and orbital angular momentum density wave patterns. The former has topological Bogoliubov excitations characterized by a uniform Chern number, while the spin-orbital supersolid phase hosts topological excitations with opposite Chern numbers which respectively protect the chiral and antichiral edge modes in the neighboring supersolid clusters. Our findings may inspire a new avenue for exploring exotic SOC and high-orbital physics in optical lattices, and shall also advance the experimental progress of novel supersolids in higher dimensions.
Comment: 7+9 pages, 4+4 figures. Discussions and references are updated