Landau–Zener tunneling in spin–orbit-coupled Bose–Einstein condensates in <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline" id="d1e478" altimg="si109.svg"><mml:mi mathvariant="script">PT</mml:mi></mml:math> periodic potentials

We study Landau–Zener (LZ) transition probability between Bloch bands in Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs) with parity-time (PT)-symmetric periodic potentials. The roles of the Raman coupling, the energy detuning, the spin–orbit coupling (SOC) and PT potentials are investigated for the corresponding transition. We find that the imaginary part of PT potentials plays important roles in the LZ tunneling rates when the chemical potentials are less...