Jae Gil Kim, Jae-weon Lee, Dong-chul Ihm, Hye Jin Lee and Eok Kyun Lee

Department of Chemistry and School of Molecular Science (BK 21), Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 373-1, Gusongdong, Yusongku, Taejon, Korea

Bifurcation analysis is applied to the spontaneous spatial symmetry breaking occurring in the ground state of two-component Bose-Einstein condensates. The cusp catastrophe describing the supercritical pitchfork bifurcation associated with the symmetry breaking is derived via the identification of the local curvature of the Gross-Pitaevskii energy functional. The bifurcation diagram and universal scaling laws for the eigenvalue and energy are obtained from the catastrophe function.