Effective spin dynamics of spin-orbit coupled matter-wave solitons in optical lattices

Abstract We consider matter–wave solitons in spin–orbit coupled Bose–Einstein condensates embedded in an optical lattice and study the dynamics of the soliton within the framework of Gross–Pitaevskii equations. We express spin components of the soliton pair in terms of nonlinear Bloch equations and investigate the effective spin dynamics. It is seen that the effective magnetic field that appears in the Bloch equation is affected by optical lattices, and thus the optical lattice influences the precessional frequency of the spin components. We make use of numerical approaches to investigate the dynamical behavior of density profiles and center-of-mass of the soliton pair in the presence of the optical lattice. It is shown that the spin density is periodically varying due to flipping of spinors between the two states. The amplitude of spin-flipping oscillation increases with lattice strength. We find that the system can also exhibit interesting nonlinear behavior for chosen values of parameters. We present a fixed point analysis to study the effects of optical lattices on the nonlinear dynamics of the spin components. It is seen that the optical lattice can act as a control parameter to change the dynamical behavior of the spin components from periodic to chaotic.