Topological excitations in rotating Bose-Einstein condensates with Rashba-Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling in a two-dimensional optical lattice

We study the ground-state configurations and spin textures of rotating two-component Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) with Rashba-Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling (RD-SOC), which are confined in a two-dimensional (2D) optical lattice plus a 2D harmonic trap. In the absence of rotation, a relatively small isotropic 2D RD-SOC leads to the generation of ghost vortices for initially miscible BECs, while it gives rise to the creation of rectangular vortex-antivortex lattices for initially immiscible BECs. As the strength of the 2D RD-SOC enhances, the visible vortices or the 2D vortex-antivortex chains are created for the former case, whereas the rectangular vortex-antivortex lattices are transformed into vortex-antivortex rings for the later case. For the initially immiscible BECs with fixed 2D RD-SOC strength, the increase of rotation frequency can result in the structural phase transition from square vortex lattice to irregular triangular vortex lattice and the system transition from initial phase separation to phase mixing. In addition, we analyze the combined effects of 1D RD-SOC and rotation on the vortex configurations of the ground states for the case of initial phase separation. The increase of 1D SOC strength, rotation frequency or both of them may result in the formation of vortex chain and phase mixing. Furthermore, the typical spin textures for both the cases of 2D RD-SOC and 1D RD-SOC are discussed. It is shown that the system favors novel spin textures and skyrmion configurations including an exotic skyrmion-half-skyrmion lattice (skyrmion-meron lattice), a complicated meron lattice, a skyrmion chain, and a Bloch domain wall.