Ground-State Properties and Phase Separation of Binary Mixtures in Mesoscopic Ring Lattices.

We investigated the spatial phase separation of the two components forming a bosonic mixture distributed in a four-well lattice with a ring geometry. We studied the ground state of this system, described by means of a binary Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian, by implementing a well-known coherent-state picture which allowed us to find the semi-classical equations determining the distribution of boson components in the ring lattice. Their fully analytic solutions, in the limit of large boson numbers, provide the boson populations at each well as a function of the interspecies interaction and of other significant model parameters, while allowing to reconstruct the non-trivial architecture of the ground-state four-well phase diagram.

The mixing-demixing phase diagram of ultracold heteronuclear mixtures in a ring trimer.

We derive the complete mixing-demixing phase-diagram relevant to a bosonic binary mixture confined in a ring trimer and modeled within the Bose-Hubbard picture. The mixing properties of the two quantum fluids, which are shown to be strongly affected by the fragmented character of the confining potential, are evaluated by means of a specific indicator imported from Statistical Thermodynamics and are shown to depend only on two effective parameters incorporating the asymmetry between the heteronuclear species. To closely match realistic experimental conditions, our study is extended also beyond the pointlike approximation of potential wells by describing the systems in terms of two coupled Gross-Pitaevskii equations.

The phase-separation mechanism of a binary mixture in a ring trimer.

We show that, depending on the ratio between the inter- and the intra-species interactions, a binary mixture trapped in a three-well potential with periodic boundary conditions exhibits three macroscopic ground-state configurations which differ in the degree of mixing. Accordingly, the corresponding quantum states feature either delocalization or a Schrödinger cat-like structure. The two-step phase separation occurring in the system, which is smoothed by the activation of tunnelling processes, is confirmed by the analysis of the energy spectrum that collapses and rearranges at the two critical points.

Residual Entropy and Critical Behavior of Two Interacting Boson Species in a Double Well.

Motivated by the importance of entanglement and correlation indicators in the analysis of quantum systems, we study the equilibrium and the bipartite residual entropy in a two-species Bose-Hubbard dimer when the spatial phase separation of the two species takes place. We consider both the zero and non-zero-temperature regime. We present different kinds of residual entropies (each one associated with a different way of partitioning the system), and we show that they strictly depend on the specific quantum phase characterizing the two species (supermixed, mixed or demixed) even at finite temperature.