Cold atom developments suggest the prospect of measuring scaling properties and long-range fluctuations of continuous phase transitions at zero-temperature. We discuss the conditions for characterizing the phase separation of Bose-Einstein condensate
s of boson atoms in two distinct hyperfine spin states. The mean-field description breaks down as the system approaches the transition from the miscible side. An effective spin description clarifies the ferromagnetic nature of the transition. We show that a difference in the scattering lengths for the bosons in the same spin state leads to an effective internal magnetic field. The conditions at which the internal magnetic field vanishes (i.e., equal values of the like-boson scattering lengths) is a special point. We show that the long range density fluctuations are suppressed near that point while the effective spin exhibits the long-range fluctuations that characterize critical points. The zero-temperature system exhibits critical opalescence with respect to long wavelength waves of impurity atoms that interact with the bosons in a spin-dependent manner.
We describe the ground state of a large, dilute, neutral atom Bose- Einstein condensate (BEC) doped with N strongly coupled mutually indistinguishable, bosonic neutral atoms (referred to as impurity) in the polaron regime where the BEC density respon
se to the impurity atoms remains significantly smaller than the average density of the surrounding BEC. We find that N impurity atoms (N is not one) can self-localize at a lower value of the impurity-boson interaction strength than a single impurity atom. When the bare short-range impurity-impurity repulsion does not play a significant role, the self-localization of multiple bosonic impurity atoms into the same single particle orbital (which we call co-self-localization) is the nucleation process of the phase separation transition. When the short-range impurity-impurity repulsion successfully competes with co-self-localization, the system may form a stable liquid of self-localized single impurity polarons.
Ultra-cold alkali atoms trapped in two distinct hyperfine states in an external magnetic field can mimic magnetic systems of spin 1/2 particles. We describe the spin-dependent effective interaction as a spin-spin interaction. As a consequence of the
zero-range, the interaction of spin 1/2 bosons can be described as an Ising or, alternatively, as an XY-coupling. We calculated the spin-spin interaction parameters as a function of the external magnetic field in the Degenerate Internal State (DIS) approximation. We illustrate the advantage of the spin-spin interaction form by mapping the system of N spin 1/2 bosons confined by a tight trapping potential on that of N spin 1/2 spins coupled via an infinite range interaction.
