Tobias Dollinger

The recent experimental advances in manipulating ultra-cold atoms make it feasible to study coherent transport of Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) through various mesoscopic structures. In this work the quasi-stationary propagation of BEC matter waves through two dimensional cavities is investigated using numerical simulations within the mean-field approach of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. The focus is on the interplay between interference effects and the interaction term in the non-linear wave equation. One sees that the transport properties show a complicated behaviour with multi-stability, hysteresis and dynamical instabilities for non-vanishing interaction. Furthermore, the prominent weak localization effect, which is a robust interference effect emerging after taking a configuration average, is reduced and partially inverted for non-vanishing interaction.

The spin-orbit interaction plays a crucial role in diverse fields of condensed matter, including the investigation of Majorana fermions, topological insulators, quantum information and spintronics. In III-V zinc-blende semiconductor heterostructures, two types of spin-orbit interaction--Rashba and Dresselhaus--act on the electron spin as effective magnetic fields with different directions. They are characterized by coefficients α and β, respectively. When α is equal to β, the so-called persistent spin helix symmetry is realized. In this condition, invariance with respect to spin rotations is achieved even in the presence of the spin-orbit interaction, implying strongly enhanced spin lifetimes for spatially periodic spin modes. Existing methods to evaluate α/β require fitting analyses that often include ambiguity in the parameters used. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a simple and fitting parameter-free technique to determine α/β and to deduce the absolute values of α and β. The ...