Nucleation and wetting transitions in three-component Bose-Einstein condensates in Gross-Pitaevskii theory: exact results

TL;DR

This paper provides exact analytical results for nucleation and wetting phase transitions in a three-component Bose-Einstein condensate within Gross-Pitaevskii theory, expanding understanding beyond previous two-component models.

Contribution

It derives exact solutions for nucleation and wetting transitions in a three-component BEC, including phase boundaries, in special and strong segregation limits.

Findings

Exact nucleation phase transition solutions for intermediate segregation.

Exact wetting phase boundary in the strong segregation limit.

Comparison with two-component BEC results and approximation methods.

Abstract

Nucleation and wetting transitions are studied in a three-component Bose-Einstein condensate mixture within Gross-Pitaevskii theory. For special cases of intermediate segregation between components 1 and 2, the nucleation phase transition of a surfactant film of component 3 is obtained by exact solution. Additional exact results for the nucleation transition are derived in the limit of strong segregation between components 1 and 2. In this limit the exact first-order wetting phase boundary is obtained using analytical and numerical methods, and is contrasted with the exact nucleation and wetting phase boundary derived previously for a two-component Bose-Einstein condensate mixture at a hard optical wall. Exact results for the three-component mixture are compared with results from the double-parabola approximation used in an earlier work.