Orbital elementary excitations as probes of entanglement and quantum phase transitions of collective spins in an entangled Bose-Einstein condensate

A mixture of two species of pseudospin-1/2 Bose gases exhibits interesting interplay between spin and orbital degrees of freedom. Expectation values of various quantities of the collective spins of the two species play crucial roles in the Gross-Pitaevskii-like equations governing the four orbital wave functions in which Bose-Einstein condensation occurs. Consequently, the elementary excitations of these orbital wave functions reflect properties of the collective spins. When the coupling between the two collective spins is isotropic, the energy gap of the gapped orbital excitation peaks, while there is a quantum phase transition in the ground state of the effective Hamiltonian of the two collective spins, which have previously been found to be maximally entangled.