Orbit-induced spin squeezing in a spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensate

In recent pioneer experiment, a strong spin-orbit coupling, with equal Rashba and Dresselhaus strengths, has been created in a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate. Moreover, many exotic superfluid phenomena induced by this strong spin-orbit coupling have been predicted. In this report, we show that this novel spin-orbit coupling has important applications in quantum metrology, such as spin squeezing. We first demonstrate that an effective spin-spin interaction, which is the heart for producing spin squeezing, can be generated by controlling the orbital degree of freedom (i.e., the momentum) of the ultracold atoms. Compared with previous schemes, this realized spin-spin interaction has advantages of no dissipation, high tunability, and strong coupling. More importantly, a giant squeezing factor (lower than −30 dB) can be achieved by tuning a pair of Raman lasers in current experimental setup. Finally, we find numerically that the phase factor of the prepared initial state affects dramatically on spin squeezing.