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.

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]

References in corpus (10)

• Solitons in nonlinear lattices
• Spontaneous symmetry breaking in a nonlinear double-well structure
• Vortex stability in nearly two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensates with attraction
• Symmetry Breaking and Self-trapping of a Dipolar Bose-Einstein Condensate in a Double-well Potential
• Symmetric and asymmetric solitons and vortices in linearly coupled two-dimensional waveguides with the cubic-quintic nonlinearity
• Symmetric and asymmetric solitons in linearly coupled Bose-Einstein condensates trapped in optical lattices
• Spontaneous soliton symmetry breaking in two-dimensional coupled Bose-Einstein condensates supported by optical lattices
• Two-Component Nonlinear Schrodinger Models with a Double-Well Potential
• Spontaneous symmetry breaking and collapse in bosonic Josephson junctions
• Spinor Bose-Einstein condensates in double well potentials

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Symmetry breaking in dipolar matter-wave solitons in dual-core couplers
• Spontaneous symmetry breaking of fundamental states, vortices, and dipoles in two- and one-dimensional linearly coupled traps with cubic self-attraction
• Spontaneous symmetry-breaking in the nonlinear Schrödinger equation on star graphs with inhomogeneities
• Symmetry Breaking in Bose-Einstein Condensates Confined by a Funnel Potential