Ground-State Properties and Phase Separation of Binary Mixtures in Mesoscopic Ring Lattices

We investigated the spatial phase separation of the two components forming a bosonic mixture distributed in a four-well lattice with a ring geometry. We studied the ground state of this system, described by means of a binary Bose–Hubbard Hamiltonian, by implementing a well-known coherent-state pictu...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Vittorio Penna, Alessandra Contestabile, Andrea Richaud
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2021-06-01
Series:Entropy
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/23/7/821
Description
Summary:We investigated the spatial phase separation of the two components forming a bosonic mixture distributed in a four-well lattice with a ring geometry. We studied the ground state of this system, described by means of a binary Bose–Hubbard Hamiltonian, by implementing a well-known coherent-state picture which allowed us to find the semi-classical equations determining the distribution of boson components in the ring lattice. Their fully analytic solutions, in the limit of large boson numbers, provide the boson populations at each well as a function of the interspecies interaction and of other significant model parameters, while allowing to reconstruct the non-trivial architecture of the ground-state four-well phase diagram. The comparison with the <i>L</i>-well (<inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mi>L</mi><mo>=</mo><mn>2</mn><mo>,</mo><mn>3</mn></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula>) phase diagrams highlights how increasing the number of wells considerably modifies the phase diagram structure and the transition mechanism from the full-mixing to the full-demixing phase controlled by the interspecies interaction. Despite the fact that the phase diagrams for <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mi>L</mi><mo>=</mo><mn>2</mn><mo>,</mo><mn>3</mn><mo>,</mo><mn>4</mn></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula> share various general properties, we show that, unlike attractive binary mixtures, repulsive mixtures do not feature a transition mechanism which can be extended to an arbitrary lattice of size <i>L</i>.
ISSN:1099-4300