  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.
