Weakly interacting spinor Bose–Einstein condensates with three-dimensional spin–orbit coupling

Starting from the Hamiltonian of the second quantization form, the weakly interacting Bose–Einstein condensate with spin–orbit coupling of Weyl type is investigated. It is found that the SU(2) nonsymmetric term, i.e., the spin-dependent interaction, can lift the degeneracy of the ground states with respect to the z component of the total angular momentum J z , casting the ground condensate state into a configuration of zero J z . This ground state density profile can also be affirmed by minimizing the full Gross–Pitaevskii energy functional. The spin texture of the zero J z state indicates that it is a knot structure, whose fundamental group is π 3(M) π 3(S 2) = Z.