Mediated interactions in a dilute Bose-Einstein condensate and Fermi gas mixture

David A. W. Hutchinson, R. J. Dodd, Nick P. Proukakis +4 more

D. H. Santamore, Eddy Timmermans

We develop a diagrammatic perturbation treatment to calculate the zero-temperature equation of state of the dilute gas mixture of a single spin component Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) and a normal Fermi gas of indistinguishable (single spin) fermion particles. We find that the mean-field description breaks down near the mechanical instability related to the phase separation phenomenon. Our analysis shows that the instability is caused by the competition of the usual short-range and fermion-mediated boson-boson interactions, which result in a boson compressibility that diverges. In the low BEC-density limit, we show that the diagrammatic analysis simplifies, we sum part of the higher-order diagrams, and we discuss the effects of other higher-order contributions.

Kevin E. Strecker, Guthrie B. Partridge, Andrew G. Truscott +1 more

D. H. Santamore, Eddy Timmermans

We investigate the collective excitations of a low-temperature dilute gas mixture that consists of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) and a Fermi gas that is a normal (i.e., nonsuperfluid) Fermi liquid. We find that the BEC-mediated fermion-fermion interactions, as a consequence of retardation, can become repulsive and support a zero-sound mode that is essentially undamped. In addition, we find a damped zero-sound mode that can be described as a BEC sound mode modified by fermion-mediated boson-boson interactions, and we derive its decay rate caused by Landau damping. We study the mode structure of these excitations and find avoided-crossing behavior as well as a termination point. The collective-mode dynamics also reveals that phase separation sets in when the fermion-mediated boson-boson interaction destroys the stability of the homogeneous BEC. We estimate the time and length scales of the onset of the phase separation, and we discuss the feasibility of experimentally probing these consequences of mediated interactions.

Hui Hu, Xia-Ji Liu

By using the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov equations within the Popov approximation, we investigate the thermodynamic properties of a dilute binary Bose-Fermi mixture confined in an isotropic harmonic trap. For mixtures with an attractive Bose-Fermi interaction, we find a sizable enhancement of the condensate fraction and of the critical temperature of Bose-Einstein condensation with respect to the predictions for a pure interacting Bose gas. Conversely, the influence of the repulsive Bose-Fermi interaction is less pronounced. The possible relevance of our results in current experiments on trapped ${}^{87}\mathrm{Rb}{\ensuremath{-}}^{40}\mathrm{K}$ mixtures is discussed.

Robert P. Smith, Zoran Hadzibabic