Many-body ground states for bosons with Rashba spin-orbit coupling*

The ground state of $N$ non-interacting bosons with a Rashba dispersion is macroscopically degenerate. It is of fundamental interest---and also relevant to current experiments in cold atomic gases with synthetic spin-orbit coupling---to determine whether a unique ground state is stabilized by interactions and what the properties of such a state might be. Motivated by exact solutions for the two-body problem, we construct many-body bosonic wave functions that saturate the kinetic energy and minimize the interaction energy, and compare with other recently proposed trial ground states.