Symmetry breaking in binary Bose-Einstein condensates in the presence of an inhomogeneous artificial gauge field

Abstract: We study a two component Bose-Einstein condensate in the presence of an inhomogeneous artificial gauge field. In response to this field, the condensate forms a localised vortex lattice structure that leads to a non-trivial symmetry breaking in the phase separated regime. The underlying physical mechanism can be understood by considering the energy landscape and we present a simplified model that is capable of reproducing the main features of the phase separation transition. The intuition gained by numerically solving this simplified model is then corroborated using the analytical Thomas-Fermi model.