Spin-wave growth via Shapiro resonances in a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate

Abstract: We theoretically study the resonant phenomenon in a spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate periodically driven by a quadratic Zeeman coupling. This phenomenon is closely related to the Shapiro steps in superconducting Josephson junctions, and the previous experimental work [Evrard $et al.,$ Phys. Rev. A 100, 023604 (2019)] for a spin-1 bosonic system observed the resonant dynamics and then called it Shapiro resonance. In this work, using the spin-1 Gross-Pitaevskii equation, we study the Shapiro resonance beyond the single-mode approximation used in the previous work, which assumes that all components of the spinor wavefunction have the same spatial configuration. Considering resonant dynamics starting from a polar state, we analytically calculate the Floquet-Lyapunov exponents featuring an onset of the resonance under a linear analysis and find that spin waves with finite wavenumbers can be excited. This kind of non-uniform excitation cannot be described by the single-mode approximation. Furthermore, to study the long-time resonant dynamics beyond the linear analysis, we numerically solve the one-dimensional spin-1 Gross-Pitaevskii equation, finding that the nonresonant hydrodynamic variables also grow at wavelengths of even multiples of the resonant one due to the nonlinear effect.