Bifurcation analysis of a two-component Bose-Einstein condensate (Q2507969): Difference between revisions

The paper is devoted to the study of the bifurcation and the phase separation of time-independent coupled nonlinear Schrödinger equations, also called time-independent coupled Gross-Pitaevskii equations. Note that such a kind of equations can be used as a mathematical model to describe a two-component Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in two different hyperfine spin states on the corresponding condensate solitary wave functions. Basically, in the paper to investigate the bifurcation of such equations authors discretize those equations by a finite difference method. In Sec. 2 the existence of the unique global minimizer of a single component BEC is shown, which satisfies an initial value problem. In Sec. 3 it is proven that the solution curve of the ground/positive bound states of a two-component Bose-Einstein condensate undergoes supercritical pitchfork bifurcations at some finite values of the inter-component scattering length. The ground state solutions bifurcate into two symmetric solutions with respect to some suitable axis on the symmetric domain, when a two-component BEC has equal intra- and inter-component scattering lengths. In sec. 4 it is shown that the ground/positive bound states repel each other and form segregated nodal domains when the repulsive scattering length goes to infinity. In Sec. 5 numerical results of bifurcation diagrams and the forms of ground/positive bound state solutions for a two-component BEC with various trap potentials are presented. A conclusion is given in Sec. 6.