Excitation spectrum of Bose-Einstein Condensates with modified dispersion*

Bose-Einstein Condensates provide a flexible platform to model a wide variety of condensed matter phenomena. To this goal, Raman dressing schemes and dynamical lattices have emerged as a premier tool, allowing for a modification of the dispersion relation leading to spin-orbit coupling and artificial gauge fields. Using Bragg spectroscopy, we investigate the collective excitation spectrum of BECs with engineered dispersion relations and study consequences of a roton-like minimum that can be softened by changing Raman dressing parameters. We report on the current status and future directions of our experiments.