Condensate-profile asymmetry of a boson mixture in a disk-shaped harmonic trap.pdf

a r X i v : c o n d - m a t / 0 4 0 5 4 6 0 v 1 [ c o n d - m a t .o t h e r ] 1 9 M a y 2 0 0 4 UNLV-HiPSEC-M04-01 Condensate-profile asymmetry of a boson mixture in a disk-shaped harmonic trap Hong Ma and Tao Pang Department of Physics, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada 89154-4002 A mixture of two types of hard-sphere bosons in a disk-shaped harmonic trap is studied through path-integral quantum Monte Carlo simulation at low temperature. We find that the system can undergo a phase transition to break the spatial symmetry of the model Hamiltonian when some of the model parameters are varied. The nature of such a phase transition is analyzed through the particle distributions and angular correlation functions. Comparisons are made between our calculations and the available mean-field results on similar models. Possible future experiments are suggested to verify our findings. PACS numbers: 03.75.Mn, 05.30.Jp, 02.70.Ss Mixtures of different cold atoms are studied inten- sively by both theorists and experimentalists after the first experimental observation of a stable double conden- sate formed from two different spin states of 87Rb [1]. In- teresting phenomena, such as the formation of molecules, can be directly realized in these mixtures [2, 3]. Further- more these mixtures form a rich set of systems that can test many-body theory and novel ideas at extremely low temperature and quantum limits [4, 5, 6]. One of the intriguing features predicted to occur in such systems, based on the solutions of the Gross– Pitaevskii equation [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14], is the broken spatial symmetry of the Hamiltonian in the con- densate profiles of individual species in the system. This is purely a quantum phenomenon because it is not ex- pected in the particle distributions of the corresponding classical systems. It is known that a double condensate can form an inner core from one species and an outer shell from the other in a spherically symmetric trap [15, 16],