Mass-imbalance-induced structures of binary atomic mixtures in box potentials

Abstract

We consider the ground states of binary atomic boson-boson and fermion-fermion mixtures confined in one-dimensional box potentials by simulating the systems using few-body models with delta-function interactions and many-body models with density-density interactions. For boson-boson mixtures, both models show signatures of phase separation in the strong repulsion regime and sandwiched structures emerge in the presence of mass imbalance. The structural difference between equal-mass and mass-imbalanced systems is due to the minimization of the interaction energy and the kinetic energies from the density distortion at the hard walls and at the phase-separation interface. The mass imbalance adjusts the kinetic energies and causes the lighter species to avoid the hard walls. For fermion-fermion mixtures, few-body simulations show a mass-imbalance induced structural changes in the strong repulsion regime, while many-body simulations show two-chunk phase separation due to the strong bulk kinetic energy. For equal-mass mixtures with strong inter-species repulsion, the few-body and many-body models predict different structures because the mean-field treatment in the many-body model approximates the contact interaction and smooths out the wavefunctions.