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Excited-state quantum phase transitions in spin-orbit coupled Bose gases

Excited-state quantum phase transitions depend on and reveal the structure of the whole spectrum of many-body systems. While they are theoretically well understood, finding suitable signatures and detect them in actual experiments remains challenging. For instance, in spinor gases, excited-state phases have been identified and characterized through a topological order parameter that is challenging to measure in experiments. Here, we propose the Raman-dressed spin-orbit coupled gas as a novel platform to explore excited-state quantum phase transitions. In a weakly-coupled regime, the dressed system is equivalent to a spinor gas with tunable spin-spin interactions. Through this equivalence we are able to define a new excited-state phase of the dressed gas. The phase is characterize by the the behavior of the spatial density modulations, or stripes, induced by spin-orbit coupling, and can in principle be measured in current state-of-the-art experiments with ultracold atoms. Conversely, we show that the properties of the excited phase can be exploited to prepare stripe states with large and stable density modulations.