A variational approach for the ground state profile of a trapped spinor-BEC: A detailed study of phase transition in spin-1 condensate at zero magnetic field

Abstract

The ground state of a spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate is selected based on the most energetically stable stationary state. It is well known that for the homogeneous condensate linear and quadratic term plays an important role to lift the degeneracy among the stationary states, giving a rich phase diagram. In this article, we investigate the ground state in absence of linear and quadratic Zeeman terms under realistic trapping potential. The spin-dependent interaction strength plays a key role in favoring one of the stationary states to have the lowest energy and thus producing the ground state of the system. We notice that the Thomas-Fermi approximated results predict that for anti-ferromagnetic condensates the energy difference between the competing stationary states is really small, requiring further analysis considering the full profile of the condensate. Thus, for the purpose of further refining results, we introduce a variational method which provides the full number density profile of the condensate with very good accuracy even for small condensates in 3dimensional isotropic harmonic confinement as well as in effective 1-dimensional harmonic trapping. Then we compare all the relevant physical parameters with those of Thomas-Fermi results.