Spontaneous symmetry breaking in linearly coupled disk-shaped Bose-Einstein condensates
Abstract
We study effects of tunnel coupling on a pair of parallel disk-shaped Bose-Einstein condensates with the self-attractive intrinsic nonlinearity. Each condensate is trapped in a combination of in-plane and transverse harmonic-oscillator potentials. It is shown that, depending on the self-interaction strength and tunneling coupling, the ground state of the system exhibits a phase transition which links three configurations: a symmetric one with equal numbers of atoms in the coupled condensates, an asymmetric configuration with a population imbalance (a manifestation of the macroscopic quantum self-trapping), and the collapsing state. A modification of the phase diagram of the system in the presence of vortices in the disk-shaped condensates is reported too. The study of dynamics around the stationary configurations reveals properties which strongly depend on the symmetry of the configuration.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1106.5340,
title = {Spontaneous symmetry breaking in linearly coupled disk-shaped Bose-Einstein condensates},
author = {Luca Salasnich and Boris A. Malomed},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1106.5340},
year = {2012}
}
Comments
13 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Molecular Physics, special issue "Luciano Reatto Festschrift" [LS thanks Luciano Reatto for 9 years of fruitful scientific collaboration at the Physics Department of the University of Milano]