Stability of ultracold atomic Bose condensates with Rashba spin-orbit coupling against quantum and thermal...

We study the stability of Bose condensates with Rashba-Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling in three dimensions against quantum and thermal fluctuations. The ground state depletion of the plane-wave condensate due to quantum fluctuations is, as we show, finite, and therefore the condensate is stable. We also calculate the corresponding shift of the ground state energy. Although the system cannot condense in the absence of interparticle interactions, by estimating the number of excited particles we show that interactions stabilize the condensate even at nonzero temperature. Unlike in the usual Bose gas, the normal phase is not kinematically forbidden at any temperature; calculating the free energy of the normal phase at finite temperature, and comparing with the free energy of the condensed state, we infer that generally the system is condensed at zero temperature, and undergoes a transition to normal at nonzero temperature.