Three-component Bose-Einstein condensates and wetting without walls

TL;DR

This paper explores wetting phase transitions in a three-component Bose-Einstein condensate system using Gross-Pitaevskii theory, revealing a clear phase diagram dependent solely on atomic parameters and identifying various transition types.

Contribution

It extends previous two-component wetting studies to three components, removing the wall boundary condition and providing a comprehensive phase diagram based on intrinsic atomic parameters.

Findings

Wetting phase diagram depends only on atomic parameters.

Identification of first-order and critical wetting transitions.

Development of analytic approximations for the phase boundaries.

Abstract

In previous work within Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) theory for ultracold gases wetting phase transitions were predicted for a phase-segregated two-component Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) adsorbed at an optical wall. The wetting phase diagram was found to depend on intrinsic atomic parameters, being the masses and the scattering lengths, and on the extrinsic wall boundary condition. Here we study wetting transitions in GP theory without an optical wall in a setting with three phase-segregated BEC components instead of two. The boundary condition is removed by replacing the wall with the third component and treating the three phases on an equal footing. This leads to an unequivocal wetting phase diagram that depends only on intrinsic atomic parameters. It features first-order and critical wetting transitions, and prewetting phenomena. The phase boundaries are computed by numerical solution of the GP equations. In addition, useful analytic results are obtained by extending the established double-parabola approximation to three components.