Solvable Model of a Mixture of Bose-Einstein Condensates

TL;DR

This paper presents an exactly solvable model for a mixture of two Bose-Einstein condensates, providing analytical expressions for properties and comparing many-body and mean-field results, revealing the persistence of many-body correlations.

Contribution

It introduces a solvable model for two-component BEC mixtures, deriving explicit formulas and analyzing the convergence of many-body results to mean-field theory.

Findings

Exact ground-state energy and densities converge to Gross-Pitaevskii results at infinite particle limit.

Mean-field theory fails to describe the variance of many-particle operators.

Many-body correlations persist even in the infinite-particle limit.

Abstract

A mixture of two kinds of identical bosons held in a harmonic potential and interacting by harmonic particle-particle interactions is discussed. This is an exactly-solvable model of a mixture of two trapped Bose-Einstein condensates which allows us to examine analytically various properties. Generalizing the treatment in [Cohen and Lee, J. Math. Phys. {\bf 26}, 3105 (1985)], closed form expressions for the ground-state energy, wave-function, and lowest-order densities are obtained and analyzed for attractive and repulsive intra-species and inter-species particle-particle interactions. A particular mean-field solution of the corresponding Gross-Pitaevskii theory is also found analytically. This allows us to compare properties of the mixture at the exact, many-body and mean-field levels, both for finite systems and at the limit of an infinite number of particles. We hereby prove that the exact ground-state energy and lowest-order intra-species and inter-species densities converge at the infinite-particle limit (when the products of the number of particles times the intra-species and inter-species interaction strengths are held fixed) to the results of the Gross-Pitaevskii theory for the mixture. Finally and on the other end, the separability of the mixture's center-of-mass coordinate is used to show that the Gross-Pitaevskii theory for mixtures is unable to describe the variance of many-particle operators in the mixture, even in the infinite-particle limit. Our analytical results show that many-body correlations exist in a mixture of Bose-Einstein condensates made of any number of particles. Implications are briefly discussed.