Binary mixtures of Bose-Einstein condensates: Phase dynamics and spatial dynamics

We investigate the relative phase coherence properties and the occurrence of demixing instabilities for two mutually interacting and time evolving Bose-Einstein condensates in traps. Our treatment naturally includes the additional decoherence effect due to fluctuations in the total number of particles. Analytical results are presented for the breathe-together solution, an extension of previously known scaling solution to the case of a binary mixture of condensates. When the three coupling constants describing the elastic interactions among the atoms in the two states are close to each other, a dramatic increase of the phase coherence time is predicted. Numerical results are presented for the parameters of the recent JILA experiments. Received 23 April 1999 and Received in final form 21 September 1999