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arXiv:2205.14518 · Physical Review Letters

Sound Propagation in a Bose-Fermi Mixture: From Weak to Strong Interactions

Krutik Patel, Geyue Cai, Henry Ando, Cheng Chin

Published Aug 23, 2023• 25 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Particlelike excitations, or quasiparticles, emerging from interacting fermionic and bosonic quantum fields underlie many intriguing quantum phenomena in high energy and condensed matter systems. Computation of the properties of these excitations is frequently intractable in the strong interaction regime. Quantum degenerate Bose-Fermi mixtures offer promising prospects to elucidate the physics of such quasiparticles. In this work, we investigate phonon propagation in an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate immersed in a degenerate Fermi gas with interspecies scattering length a_{BF} tuned by a Feshbach resonance. We observe sound mode softening with moderate attractive interactions. For even greater attraction, surprisingly, stable sound propagation reemerges and persists across the resonance. The stability of phonons with resonant interactions opens up opportunities to investigate novel Bose-Fermi liquids and fermionic pairing in the strong interaction regime.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.131.083003

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Particlelike excitations, or quasiparticles, emerging from interacting fermionic and bosonic quantum fields underlie many intriguing quantum phenomena in high energy and condensed matter systems. Computation of the properties of these excitations is frequently intractable in the strong interaction regime. Quantum degenerate Bose-Fermi mixtures offer promising prospects to elucidate the physics of such quasiparticles. In this work, we investigate phonon propagation in an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate immersed in a degenerate Fermi gas with interspecies scattering length a_{BF} tuned by a Feshbach resonance. We observe sound mode softening with moderate attractive interactions. For even greater attraction, surprisingly, stable sound propagation reemerges and persists across the resonance. The stability of phonons with resonant interactions opens up opportunities to investigate novel Bose-Fermi liquids and fermionic pairing in the strong interaction regime.
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Recent experiments performed with fermionic /sup 6/Li and /sup 40/K atoms, which possess both Feshbach resonances at convenient magnetic fields are discussed. When /sup 40/K is mixed with a Bose-Einstein condensate of /sup 87/Rb, for sufficient atom numbers of both species, a collapse of the Fermi gas is observed. This is the result of the strong interspecies attractive interaction which overcomes the Fermi pressure in the quantum degenerate regime. As for the case of phonon-induced interaction between electrons in superconductors, it is predicted that the boson-fermion attractive interaction favors Cooper pairing of fermions when prepared in a mixture of two states.
The quasiparticle excitations and dynamical stability of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate coupled to a quantum degenerate Fermi gas of atoms at zero temperature is studied. The Fermi gas is assumed to be either in the normal state or to have undergone a phase transition to a superfluid state by forming Cooper pairs. The quasiparticle excitations of the Bose-Einstein condensate exhibit a dynamical instability due to a resonant exchange of energy and momentum with quasiparticle excitations of the Fermi gas. The stability regime for the bosons depends on whether the Fermi gas is in the normal state or in the superfluid state. We show that the energy gap in the quasiparticle spectrum for the superfluid state stabilizes the low-energy excitations of the condensate. In the stable regime, we calculate the boson quasiparticle spectrum, which is modified by the fluctuations in the density of the Fermi gas.
Quantum droplets have been realized in experiments on binary boson mixtures and dipolar Bose gases. In these systems, the mean-field energy of the Bose-Einstein condensation is attractive, and the repulsive Lee-Huang-Yang energy is crucial for stability. However, since the Lee-Huang-Yang term is not taken into account when constructing the Bogoliubov Hamiltonian, in the droplet regime one faces the problem of dynamically unstable phonon modes. In this work, we go beyond the Bogoliubov theory to study how the phonon mode is stabilized in the quantum droplet of a binary boson mixture. Similar to Beliaev's approach to a single-component Bose gas, we compute higher-order contributions to the self-energy of the boson propagator. We find that the interaction between spin and phonon excitations is the key for the phonon stability. We obtain the sound velocity which can be tested by measuring the superfluid critical velocity of the droplet in experiments. Beliaev damping of this quantum droplet is also discussed.