We consider a homogeneous Bose gas of particles with an attractive interaction in an elongated three-dimensional box with periodic boundary conditions. Mean-field theory predicts for this system a spontaneous breaking of the translational symmetry at a certain value of the interaction strength. We show that at this point a second-order quantum phase transition occurs. We investigate the system in the vicinity of the critical point using Bogoliubov theory and a continuous description, that allows us to analyze quantum fluctuations in the system even when the Bogoliubov approach breaks down.
We consider a Bose-Einstein condensate with an attractive particle interaction in a symmetric double well potential. It is known that in the mean field description a symmetric solution for the condensate wavefunction becomes unstable when the interactions are stronger than some critical value. We analyze the system around the critical point applying the number conserving Bogoliubov theory and exact diagonalization of the two mode hamiltonian. It allows for estimation of the density fluctuations in the system. Fluctuations of the order parameter, which is defined in the mean field description, turn out to be maximal at the critical point.
We consider a Bose-Einstein condensate in a double-well potential undergoing a dynamical transition from the regime of Josephson oscillations to the regime of self-trapping. We analyze the statistical properties of the ground state (or the highest excited state) of the Hamiltonian in these two regimes for attractive (repulsive) interactions. We demonstrate that it is impossible to describe the transition within the mean-field theory. In contrast, the transition proceeds through a strongly correlated delocalized state, with large quantum fluctuations, and spontaneous breaking of the symmetry.
We study the spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) of a superfluid Bose-Fermi (BF) mixture in a double-well potential (DWP). The mixture is described by the Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE) for the bosons, coupled to an equation for the order parameter of the Fermi superfluid, which is derived from the respective density functional in the unitarity limit (a similar model applies to the BCS regime, too). Straightforward SSB in the degenerate Fermi gas loaded into a DWP is impossible, as it requires an attractive self-interaction, and the intrinsic nonlinearity in the Fermi gas is repulsive. Nonetheless, we demonstrate that the symmetry breaking is possible in the mixture with attraction between fermions and bosons, like
40K and
87Rb. Numerical results are represented by dependencies of asymmetry parameters for both components on particle numbers of the mixture,
NF and
NB, and by phase diagrams in the
(NF,NB) plane, which displays regions of symmetric and asymmetric ground states. The dynamical picture of the SSB, induced by a gradual transformation of the single-well potential into the DWP, is reported too. An analytical approximation is proposed for the case when the GPE for the boson wave function may be treated by means of the Thomas-Fermi (TF) approximation. Under a special linear relationship between
NF and
NB, the TF approximation allows us to reduce the model to a single equation for the fermionic function, which includes competing repulsive and attractive nonlinear terms. The latter one directly displays the mechanism of the generation of the effective attraction in the Fermi superfluid, mediated by the bosonic component of the mixture.
The ground state and spectral properties of Bose gases in double-well potentials are studied in two different scenarios: (i) an interacting atomic Bose gas, and (ii) a mixture of an atomic gas interacting with diatomic molecules. A ground state second-order quantum phase transition is observed in both scenarios. For large attractive values of the atom-atom interaction, the ground state is degenerate. For repulsive and small attractive interaction, the ground state is not degenerate and is well approximated by a boson coherent state. Both systems depict an excited state quantum phase transition. In both cases, a critical energy separates a region in which all the energy levels are degenerate in pairs, from another region in which there are no degeneracies. For the atomic system, the critical point displays a singularity in the density of states, whereas this behavior is largely smoothed for the mixed atom-molecule system.
We employ mean-field, Bogoliubov and many-body theories to study critical fluctuations in the position and momentum of a Bose-Einstein condensate whose translation symmetry is spontaneously broken due to attractive interactions. In a homogeneous system, the many-body ground state of the symmetry-preserving Hamiltonian is very fragile against superposition of low-lying states, while the mean-field theory predicts a stable bright soliton which spontaneously breaks translation symmetry. We show that weak symmetry-breaking perturbations cause the translation-symmetric many-body ground state to cross over to a many-body bright soliton. We argue that the center-of-mass fluctuations in the soliton state arise primarily from the depletion of the condensate to translation modes. We develop an extended mean-field theory to analytically reproduce these results obtained by the exact diagonalization method.