- Open Access
Shift of the Bose-Einstein condensation transition in the presence of a second atomic species
APS Open Sci. 1, 000060 – Published 13 July, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/3gr1-mcmm
Abstract
Atomic interactions play an important role in the properties of ultracold atomic gases. In single-component bosonic systems, its effect is already present at the critical point for the Bose-Einstein condensate phase transition by shifting it to lower temperatures as a consequence of effective repulsion between the atoms. When considering atomic bosonic mixtures, interesting effects arise from the competition between intra- and interspecies interactions such as the miscible-immiscible phase transition and the particular case of self-bounded quantum droplets. In such a scenario, it is natural to expect that these interactions will also affect the critical point of each species composing the mixture. In this paper, we obtain semianalytical expressions for the critical temperature shift of the phase transition to a Bose-Einstein condensate in the presence of a second species considering the mean-field framework. We treat differently the cases in which the second species is above or below its own critical temperature and apply the obtained relations to the case of a bosonic mixture that can be realized in current running experimental setups. Our findings can be easily extended to other atomic mixtures.
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Article Text
Supplemental Material
References (31)
- M. H. Anderson, J. R. Ensher, M. R. Matthews, C. E. Wieman, and E. A. Cornell, Observation of Bose-Einstein condensation in a dilute atomic vapor, Science 269, 198 (1995).
- K. B. Davis, M.-O. Mewes, M. R. Andrews, N. J. van Druten, D. S. Durfee, D. M. Kurn, and W. Ketterle, Bose-Einstein condensation in a gas of sodium atoms, Phys. Rev. Lett. 75, 3969 (1995).
- C. C. Bradley, C. A. Sackett, J. J. Tollett, and R. G. Hulet, Evidence of Bose-Einstein condensation in an atomic gas with attractive interactions, Phys. Rev. Lett. 75, 1687 (1995).
- J. Steinhauer, Observation of quantum Hawking radiation and its entanglement in an analogue black hole, Nat. Phys. 12, 959 (2016).
- C. Gross and I. Bloch, Quantum simulations with ultracold atoms in optical lattices, Science 357, 995 (2017).
- L. Pitaevskii and S. Stringari, Bose-Einstein Condensation and Superfluidity (Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 2016), Vol. 164.
- M. Bruderer, W. Bao, and D. Jaksch, Self-trapping of impurities in Bose-Einstein condensates: Strong attractive and repulsive coupling, Europhys. Lett. 82, 30004 (2008).
- N. Spethmann, F. Kindermann, S. John, C. Weber, D. Meschede, and A. Widera, Dynamics of single neutral impurity atoms immersed in an ultracold gas, Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 235301 (2012).
- J. W. Park, S. A. Will, and M. W. Zwierlein, Ultracold dipolar gas of fermionic molecules in their absolute ground state, Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 205302 (2015).
- T.-L. Ho and V. B. Shenoy, Binary mixtures of Bose condensates of alkali atoms, Phys. Rev. Lett. 77, 3276 (1996).
- B. D. Esry, C. H. Greene, J. P. Burke, Jr., and J. L. Bohn, Hartree-Fock theory for double condensates, Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 3594 (1997).
- H. Pu and N. P. Bigelow, Properties of two-species Bose condensates, Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 1130 (1998).
- F. Riboli and M. Modugno, Topology of the ground state of two interacting Bose-Einstein condensates, Phys. Rev. A 65, 063614 (2002).
- E. Altman, W. Hofstetter, E. Demler, and M. D. Lukin, Phase diagram of two-component bosons on an optical lattice, New J. Phys. 5, 113 (2003).
- A. Isacsson, M.-C. Cha, K. Sengupta, and S. M. Girvin, Superfluid-insulator transitions of two-species bosons in an optical lattice, Phys. Rev. B 72, 184507 (2005).
- V. Bagnato, D. E. Pritchard, and D. Kleppner, Bose-Einstein condensation in an external potential, Phys. Rev. A 35, 4354 (1987).
- S. Giorgini, L. P. Pitaevskii, and S. Stringari, Condensate fraction and critical temperature of a trapped interacting Bose gas, Phys. Rev. A 54, R4633 (1996).
- A. P. Albus, S. Giorgini, F. Illuminati, and L. Viverit, Critical temperature of Bose–Einstein condensation in trapped atomic Bose–Fermi mixtures, J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 35, L511 (2002).
- O. Hryhorchak and V. Pastukhov, Large- expansion for condensation and stability of Bose-Bose mixtures at finite temperatures, J. Low Temp. Phys. 202, 219 (2021).
- R. Grimm, M. Weidemüller, and Y. B. Ovchinnikov, Optical dipole traps for neutral atoms, Adv. At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 42, 95 (2000).
- C. J. Pethick and H. Smith, Bose–Einstein Condensation in Dilute Gases (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2008).
- P. C. M. Castilho, E. Pedrozo-Peñafiel, E. M. Gutierrez, P. L. Mazo, G. Roati, K. M. Farias, and V. S. Bagnato, A compact experimental machine for studying tunable Bose–Bose superfluid mixtures, Laser Phys. Lett. 16, 035501 (2019).
- E. M. Gutierrez, G. A. de Oliveira, K. M. Farias, V. S. Bagnato, and P. C. M. Castilho, Miscibility regimes in a – quantum mixture, Appl. Sci. 11, 9099 (2021).
- T. A. Schulze, T. Hartmann, K. K. Voges, M. W. Gempel, E. Tiemann, A. Zenesini, and S. Ospelkaus, Feshbach spectroscopy and dual-species Bose-Einstein condensation of mixtures, Phys. Rev. A 97, 023623 (2018).
- Even if the miscible condition for a trapped system is not exact, miscibility effects are more relevant when both species exhibit a BEC and, for the range of parameters explored in this paper, we did not see a strong depletion of species 1 due to its interaction with species 2 when running a Hartree-Fock model [6].
- Although the chemical potential is zero for the thermal fraction, it is nonzero and positive for the condensed one.
- P. C. M. Castilho, New experimental system to study coupled vortices in a two-species Bose-Einstein condensate with tunable interactions, Ph.D. thesis, Universidade de São Paulo, 2017.
- See Supplemental Material at http://link.aps.org/supplemental/10.1103/3gr1-mcmm for details about the full Hartree-Fock simulation of our specific case.
- F. Gerbier, J. H. Thywissen, S. Richard, M. Hugbart, P. Bouyer, and A. Aspect, Critical temperature of a trapped, weakly interacting Bose gas, Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 030405 (2004).
- R. P. Smith, R. L. D. Campbell, N. Tammuz, and Z. Hadzibabic, Effects of interactions on the critical temperature of a trapped Bose gas, Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 250403 (2011).
- H. Okamoto et al., Binary Alloy Phase Diagrams (ASM International, Materials Park, OH, 1990), Vol. 12, p. 3528.