Interaction-induced topological Bogoliubov excitations in a spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensate

We study topologically nontrivial excitations of a weakly interacting, spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensate in a two-dimensional square optical lattice, a system recently realized in experiment [Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 150401 (2018)]. We focus on situations where the system is not subjected to a Zeeman field and thus does not exhibit nontrivial single-particle band topology. Of special interest then is the role of particle interaction as well as its interplay with the symmetry properties of the system in producing topologically nontrivial excitations. We find that the noninteracting system possesses a rich set of symmetries, including the PT symmetry, the modified dihedral point-group symmetry (D) over tilde (4) and the nonsymmorphic symmetry. These combined symmetries ensure the existence of pairs of degenerate Dirac points at the edge of Brillouin zone for the single-particle energy bands. In the presence of particle interaction and with sufficient spin-orbit coupling, the atoms condense in a ground state with net magnetization which spontaneously breaks the PT and (D) over tilde (4) symmetry. We demonstrate that this symmetry breaking leads to a gap opening at the Dirac point for the Bogoliubov spectrum and consequentially topologically nontrivial excitations. We confirm the nontrivial topology by calculating the Chern numbers of the lowest excitation bands and show that gapless edge states form at the interface of systems characterized by different values of the Chern number.