Critical wetting, first-order wetting and prewetting phase transitions in binary mixtures of Bose-Einstein condensates

Abstract

An ultralow-temperature binary mixture of Bose-Einstein condensates adsorbed at an optical wall can undergo a wetting phase transition in which one of the species excludes the other from contact with the wall. Interestingly, while hard-wall boundary conditions entail the wetting transition to be of first order, using Gross-Pitaevskii theory we show that first-order wetting as well as critical wetting can occur when a realistic exponential optical wall potential (evanescent wave) with a finite turn-on length $\lambda$ is assumed. The relevant surface excess energies are computed in an expansion in $\lambda /{\xi }_i$, where ${\xi }_i$ is the healing length of condensate $i$. Experimentally, the wetting transition may best be approached by varying the interspecies scattering length $a_{12}$ using Feshbach resonances. In the hard-wall limit, $\lambda \to 0$, exact results are derived for the prewetting and first-order wetting phase boundaries.

18 pages, 15 figures

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Cited by in corpus (3)

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• Evaluation of the particle numbers via the two root mean square radii in a 2-species Bose-Einstein condensate