2014/09/30 by Bert Van Schaeybroeck, Joseph O. Indekeu, Joseph Indekeu
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Bose–Einstein condensate #Boundary (topology) #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Condensed matter physics #Lambda #Materials science #Mathematics #Order (exchange) #Phase (matter) #Phase boundary #Phase transition #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics #Scattering #Strong Light-Matter Interactions #Thermodynamics #Wetting #Wetting transition #cond-mat.quant-gas #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.91.013626
published as Phys. Rev. A 91, 013626 (2015) · 18 pages, 15 figures
openalex publication_date 2015/01/23 · arxiv created 2015/02/02 · arxiv updated 2015/02/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
An ultralow-temperature binary mixture of Bose-Einstein condensates adsorbed at an optical wall can undergo a wetting phase transition in which one of the species excludes the other from contact with the wall. Interestingly, while hard-wall boundary conditions entail the wetting transition to be of first order, using Gross-Pitaevskii theory we show that first-order wetting as well as critical wetting can occur when a realistic exponential optical wall potential (evanescent wave) with a finite turn-on length \ensuremathλ is assumed. The relevant surface excess energies are computed in an expansion in \ensuremathλ/\ensuremathξi, where \ensuremathξi is the healing length of condensate i. Experimentally, the wetting transition may best be approached by varying the interspecies scattering length a12 using Feshbach resonances. In the hard-wall limit, \ensuremathλ\ensuremath→0, exact results are derived for the prewetting and first-order wetting phase boundaries.