Spontaneously axisymmetry-breaking phase in a binary mixture of spinor Bose-Einstein condensates

We study the ground-state phases for a mixture of two atomic spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates in the presence of a weak magnetic (B) field. The ground state is found to contain a broken-axisymmetry (BA) phase due to competitions among intraspecies and interspecies spin-exchange interactions and the linear Zeeman shifts. This is in contrast to the case of a single-species spin-1 condensate, where the axisymmetry breaking results from competitions among the linear and quadratic Zeeman shifts and the intraspecies ferromagnetic interaction. All other remaining ground-state phases for the mixture are found to preserve axisymmetry. We further elaborate on the ground-state phase diagram and calculate the Bogoliubov excitation spectra of the phases. For the BA phase, there exist three Goldstone modes that attempt to restore the broken U(1) and SO(2) symmetries.