arXiv:2005.08036 · Physical Review A
Phase separation of a Bose-Bose mixture: Impact of the trap and particle-number imbalance
Maxim Pyzh, Peter Schmelcher
Abstract
We explore a few-body mixture of two bosonic species confined in quasi-one-dimensional parabolic traps of different length scales. The ground-state phase diagrams in the three-dimensional parameter space spanned by the harmonic length scale ratio, interspecies coupling strength, and particle-number ratio are investigated. As a first case study we use the mean-field ansatz (MF) to perform a detailed analysis of the separation mechanism. It allows us to derive a simple and intuitive rule predicting which of the immiscible phases is energetically more favorable at the miscible-immiscible phase boundary. We estimate the critical coupling strength for the miscible-immiscible transition and perform a comparison to correlated many-body results obtained by means of the multilayer multiconfiguration time-dependent Hartree method for bosonic mixtures (ML-X). At a critical ratio of the trap frequencies, determined solely by the particle-number ratio, the deviations between MF and ML-X are very pronounced and can be attributed to a high degree of entanglement between the components. As a result, we evidence the breakdown of the effective one-body picture. Additionally, when many-body correlations play a substantial role, the one-body density is in general not sufficient for deciding upon the phase at hand which we demonstrate exemplarily.