Regular Article

Coherent control of spin-orbit-coupled atom in a double-well potential

¹ Key Laboratory of Atomic and Molecular Physics & Functional Materials of Gansu Province, College of Physics and Electronic Engineering, Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou 730070, P.R. China
² National Laboratory of Science and Technology on Computational Physics, Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, Beijing 100088, P.R. China

^a e-mail: wwychina@126.com

Received: 10 April 2017
Received in final form: 15 June 2017
Published online: 16 November 2017

Abstract

We study coherent control of a spin-orbit-coupled single atom in a double-well potential. The manipulation is achieved by applying an additional periodic driven magnetic field gradient to generate the spin-dependent force. Therefore, the strength of the spin-orbit coupling (SOC) can be continuously tuned by adjusting the driving amplitude. The atom may occupy two possible spin states which are coupled by varying fields. We show that the SOC allows controlling the interwell tunneling of the atom with or without spin-flipping and may lead to complete suppression of the tunneling at specific values of the coupling strength. By selecting the driving parameters, we propose a switchlike scheme for controlling the interwell tunneling and spin-flipping of the atom in a double-well potential.