Ground-state Properties and Bogoliubov Modes of a Harmonically Trapped One-Dimensional Quantum Droplet

TL;DR

This paper investigates the properties and excitations of one-dimensional quantum droplets in a harmonic trap, revealing how confinement influences their structure, excitation spectrum, and critical particle numbers.

Contribution

It develops a universal form of the extended Gross-Pitaevskii equation for trapped quantum droplets and analyzes their excitation modes and critical particle numbers.

Findings

Confinement alters the droplet's flat-top structure and mean square radius.

The breathing mode connects self-bound and ideal gas limits.

Critical particle numbers decrease exponentially with trapping strength.

Abstract

We study the stationary and excitation properties of a one-dimensional quantum droplet in the two-component Bose mixture trapped in a harmonic potential. By constructing the energy functional for the inhomogeneous mixture, we elaborate the extended the Gross-Pitaevskii equation applicable to both symmetric and asymmetric mixtures into a universal form, and the equations in two different dimensionless schemes are in a duality relation, i.e. the unique parameters left are inverse of each other. The Bogoliubov equations for the trapped droplet are obtained by linearizing the small density fluctuation around the ground state and the low-lying excitation modes are calculated numerically.It is found that the confinement trap changes easily the flat-top structure for large droplets and alters the mean square radius and the chemical potential intensively. The breathing mode of the confined droplet connects the self-bound and ideal gas limits, with the excitation in the weakly interacting Bose condensate for large particle numbers lying in between. We explicitly show how the continuum spectrum of the excitation is split into discrete modes, and finally taken over by the harmonic trap. Two critical particle numbers are identified by the minimum size of the trapped droplet and the maximum breathing mode energy, both of which are found to decrease exponentially with the trapping parameter.