Phase-separated symmetry-breaking vortex-lattice in a binary Bose-Einstein condensate

TL;DR

This paper investigates the spontaneous formation of phase-separated vortex lattices in a rapidly rotating binary Bose-Einstein condensate, revealing how inter- and intra-species interactions influence vortex lattice configurations and symmetry breaking.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of symmetry-breaking vortex lattice phase separation in binary BECs and analyzes the effects of interaction energies on lattice shapes using numerical solutions.

Findings

Vortex lattices of different components can be spatially separated with no overlap.

Equal intra-species interactions lead to identical semicircular vortex lattices with parity conjugation.

Nearly equal intra-species interactions produce phase separation with different lattice shapes.

Abstract

We study spontaneous-symmetry-breaking circularly-asymmetric phase separation of vortex lattices in a rapidly rotating harmonically-trapped quasi-two-dimensional (quasi-2D) binary Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with repulsive inter- and intra-species interactions. The phase separated vortex lattices of the components appear in different regions of space with no overlap between the vortices of the two components, which will permit an efficient experimental observation of such vortices and accurate study of the effect of atomic interaction on such vortex lattice. Such phase separation takes place when the intra-species interaction energies of the two components are equal or nearly equal with relatively strong inter-species repulsion. When the intra-species energies are equal, the two phase-separated vortex lattices have identical semicircular shapes with one being the parity conjugate of the other. When the intra-species energies are nearly equal, the phase separation is also complete but the vortex lattices have different shapes. We demonstrate our claim with a numerical solution of the mean-field Gross-Pitaevskii equation for a rapidly rotating quasi-2D binary BEC.