Condensate-profile asymmetry of a boson mixture in a disk-shaped harmonic trap

A mixture of two types of hard-sphere bosons in a disk-shaped harmonic trap is studied through path-integral quantum Monte Carlo simulation at low temperature. We find that the system can undergo a phase transition to break the spatial symmetry of the model Hamiltonian when some of the model parameters are varied. The nature of such a phase transition is analyzed through the particle distributions and angular correlation functions. Comparisons are made between our calculations and the available mean-field results on similar models. Possible future experiments are suggested to verify our findings.