Modulational instability of Bose-Einstein condensates with helicoidal spin-orbit coupling.

We theoretically study the modulation instability (MI) of the two-component helicoidal spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs). The effects of spin-orbit coupling, the helicoidal gauge potential, and atomic interactions on MI are investigated. The results indicate that the presence of the helicoidal gauge potential breaks the symmetric properties of MI, strongly modifies the distribution of the MI region and the MI gain in parameters space, and the MI can be excited even when the miscibility condition for the atomic interactions is satisfied. Furthermore, the effect of the helicoidal gauge potential on MI is strongly coupled with the intra and intercomponent atomic interactions. Particularly, with the increase of the helical gauge potential, the MI gain increases for the repulsive atomic interaction case, however, the MI gain decreases for the attractive atomic interaction case. The direct numerical simulations are performed to support the analytical predictions, and a good agreement is found. Our results provide a potential way to manipulate the MI in BECs with helicoidal gauge potential.