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

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, $\lambda \rightarrow 0$, exact results are derived for the prewetting and first-order wetting phase boundaries.Comment: 18 pages, 15 figure

Collective Excitations of Harmonically Trapped Ideal Gases

We theoretically study the collective excitations of an ideal gas confined in an isotropic harmonic trap. We give an exact solution to the Boltzmann-Vlasov equation; as expected for a single-component system, the associated mode frequencies are integer multiples of the trapping frequency. We show that the expressions found by the scaling ansatz method are a special case of our solution. Our findings, however, are most useful in case the trap contains more than one phase: we demonstrate how to obtain the oscillation frequencies in case an interface is present between the ideal gas and a different phase.Comment: 4 pages, submitted to special issue of Eur. Phys. J. B "Novel Quantum Phases and Mesoscopic Physics in Quantum Gases

Normal-Superfluid Interface for Polarized Fermion Gases

Recent experiments on imbalanced fermion gases have proved the existence of a sharp interface between a superfluid and a normal phase. We show that, at the lowest experimental temperatures, a temperature difference between N and SF phase can appear as a consequence of the blocking of energy transfer across the interface. Such blocking is a consequence of the existence of a SF gap, which causes low-energy normal particles to be reflected from the N-SF interface. Our quantitative analysis is based on the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov-de Gennes formalism, which allows us to give analytical expressions for the thermodynamic properties and characterize the possible interface scattering regimes, including the case of unequal masses. Our central result is that the thermal conductivity is exponentially small at the lowest experimental temperatures.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Static interfacial properties of Bose-Einstein condensate mixtures

Interfacial profiles and interfacial tensions of phase-separated binary mixtures of Bose-Einstein condensates are studied theoretically. The two condensates are characterized by their respective healing lengths $\xi_1$ and $\xi_2$ and by the inter-species repulsive interaction $K$. An exact solution to the Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) equations is obtained for the special case $\xi_2/\xi_1 = 1/2$ and $K = 3/2$. Furthermore, applying a double-parabola approximation (DPA) to the energy density featured in GP theory allows us to define a DPA model, which is much simpler to handle than GP theory but nevertheless still captures the main physics. In particular, a compact analytic expression for the interfacial tension is derived that is useful for all $\xi_1, \xi_2$ and $K$. An application to wetting phenomena is presented for condensates adsorbed at an optical wall. The wetting phase boundary obtained within the DPA model nearly coincides with the exact one in GP theory.Comment: 24 pages, 6 figure

Criterion for explosive percolation transitions on complex networks

In a recent Letter, Friedman and Landsberg discussed the underlying mechanism of explosive phase transitions on complex networks [Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 255701 (2009)]. This Brief Report presents a modest, though more insightful extension of their arguments. We discuss the implications of their results on the cluster-size distribution and deduce that, under general conditions, the percolation transition will be explosive if the mean number of nodes per cluster diverges in the thermodynamic limit and prior to the transition threshold. In other words, if, upon increase of the network size n the amount of clusters in the network does not grow proportionally to n, the percolation transition is explosive. Simulations and analytical calculations on various models support our findings