Negative-Mass Effects in Spin-Orbit Coupled Bose-Einstein Condensates

Negative effective masses can be realized by engineering the dispersion relation of a variety of quantum systems. A recent experiment with spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates has shown that a negative effective mass can halt the free expansion of the condensate and lead to fringes in the density [M. A. Khamehchi et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 155301 (2017)PRLTAO0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.118.155301]. Here, we show that the underlying cause of these observations is the self-interference of the wave packet that arises when only one of the two effective mass parameters that characterize the dispersion of the system is negative. We show that spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates may access regimes where both mass parameters controlling the propagation and diffusion of the condensate are negative, which leads to the novel phenomenon of counterpropagating self-interfering packets.