In a recent Letter (Phys. Rev. lett. 105, 195301 (2010)), Song et al. introduced a new variational approach to treat strong attractive boson-fermion (BF) correlations in BF atomic mixtures. The proposed theory predicts a first order phase transition to a condensate of composite BF pairs with center of mass momentum Q=0 as opposed to a composite fermionic molecular Fermi gas. We show in this comment that their approach is incorrect and moreover, by resorting to an exactly solvable model we demonstrate that there cannot be more than one correlated Q=0 BF pair in complete contradiction with their conclusions.
In a recent Letter (Phys. Rev. lett. 105, 195301 (2010)), Song et al. introduced a new variational approach to treat strong attractive boson-fermion (BF) correlations in BF atomic mixtures. The proposed theory predicts a first order phase transition to a condensate of composite BF pairs with center of mass momentum Q=0 as opposed to a composite fermionic molecular Fermi gas. We show in this comment that their approach is incorrect and moreover, by resorting to an exactly solvable model we demonstrate that there cannot be more than one correlated Q=0 BF pair in complete contradiction with their conclusions.
In this Letter we study dressed bound states in Fermi-Bose mixtures near broad interspecies resonances, and implications on many-body correlations. We present the evidence for a first order phase transition between a mixture of Fermi gas and condensate, and a fully paired mixture where extended fermionic molecules occupy a single pairing channel instead of forming a molecular Fermi surface. We further investigate the effect of Fermi surface dynamics and pair fluctuations and discuss the validity of our results.
We study the role of the Bose–Fermi (BF) pair correlations in the cold BF-mixture of atomic gases. After summarizing the previous results on the formation of composite BF-pairs in the uniform BF mixture, we present an exactly solvable model where bosons and fermions are distributed over finite number of orbits and interact via attractive pairing-type interaction. We show that, as the interaction strength increases, BF pairs with different quantum numbers are gradually created in the ground state through a series of level crossings, until finally the system becomes a Fermi sea of BF-pairs.
We consider a Bose-Fermi mixture with a broad and tunable Feshbach resonance allowing to change continuously the attraction between bosons and fermions from weak to strong coupling. We set up a diagrammatic formalism which includes both the Bose-Fermi tunable attraction and the Bose-Bose repulsion at zero temperature. Remarkably, we find that for boson density smaller than or equal to the fermion density, the boson condensate fraction does not depend on the density imbalance across most of the resonance. In the limit of vanishing boson concentration, we find very good agreement with previous results for the polaron quasi-particle residue obtained in the context of strongly polarized Fermi-Fermi mixtures [1]. We calculate also the boson and fermion chemical potentials and momentum distribution functions and, when the condensate fraction vanishes, we recover the results of our previous works for the normal phase [2,3]. In addition, we calculate the effective masses and Fermi steps for the unpaired and composite fermions. We find that the Fermi step of the unpaired fermions remains pinned to the value given by the Fermi radius of a free Fermi gas across most of the resonance, in agreement with the Luttinger’s theorem [4], until molecules start to form (g≈1). The formation of molecules is signalled by the appearance of a second pole in the boson-fermion propagator, which marks the access to a regime where bosons, fermions and molecules cohexist, and by the presence of a Fermi step for the composite fermions, which is related to the density of molecules. Finally, we find quite a good agreement between our results for the condensate fraction and Quantum Monte Carlo calculations [5].
I will review recent work by us on the properties of Bose-Fermi mixtures with a tunable pairing interaction between bosons and fermions. A many-body diagrammatic approach, able to describe the condensed phase of a Bose-Fermi mixture from weak to strong boson-fermion couplings, will be presented [1]. This approach will be validated by comparing it with previous [2] and new dedicated fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo calculations. By using both methods, a universal behavior of the condensate fraction and bosonic momentum distribution with respect to the boson concentration is found in an extended range of boson-fermion couplings and concentrations. For vanishing boson density, the bosonic condensate fraction reduces to the quasiparticle weight Z of the Fermi polaron studied in the context of polarized Fermi gases, unifying in this way two apparently unrelated quantities. Finally, I will discuss an interesting effect occurring in the molecular limit of the boson- fermion coupling, where the condensation is completely suppressed [3]. This phenomenon is an indirect effect on bosons of the Pauli exclusion principle acting on fermions, and is the counterpart in BoseFermi mixtures of the so called “Sarma phase” discussed for polarized Fermi gases. [1] A. Guidini, G. Bertaina, D. Galli, and P. Pieri, arXiv:1412.2542. [2] G. Bertaina, E. Fratini, S. Giorgini, and P. Pieri, Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 115303 (2013). [3] A. Guidini, G. Bertaina, E. Fratini, and P. Pieri, Phys. Rev. A 89, 023634 (2014).
We test a non equilibrium approach to study the behavior of a Bose-Fermi mixture of alkali atoms in the presence of a Feshbach resonance between bosons and fermions. To this end we derive the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) equations of motion for, the interacting system. This approach has proven very successful in the study of resonant systems composed of Bose particles and Fermi particles. However, when applied to a Bose-Fermi mixture, the HFB theory fails to identify even the correct binding energy of molecules in the appropriate limit. Through a more rigorous analysis we are able to ascribe this difference to the peculiar role that bosonic depletion plays in the Bose-Fermi pair correlation, which is the mechanism through which molecules are formed. We therefore conclude that molecular formation in Bose-Fermi mixtures is driven by three point and higher order correlations in the gas, unlike any other resonant system studied in the context of ultra-cold atomic physics.
We consider a mixture of single-component bosonic and fermionic atoms with an interspecies interaction that is varied using a Feshbach resonance. By performing a mean-field analysis of a two-channel model, which describes both narrow and broad Feshbach resonances, we find an unexpectedly rich phase diagram at zero temperature: Bose-condensed and non-Bose-condensed phases form a variety of phase-separated states that are accompanied by both critical and tricritical points. We discuss the implications of our results for the experimentally observed collapse of Bose-Fermi mixtures on the attractive side of the Feshbach resonance, and we make predictions for future experiments on Bose-Fermi mixtures close to a Feshbach resonance.