The collapse of a trapped boson-fermion mixture with attraction between bosons and fermions is investigated in the framework of the effective Hamiltonian for the Bose system. The properties of an
87Rb and
40K mixture are analyzed quantitatively at
T=0. We find numerically solutions of the modified Gross-Pitaevskii equation which continuously go from the stable to the unstable branch. We discuss how the conditions for the onset of collapse are related to the macroscopic properties of the system. A comparison with the case of a Bose condensate of the atomic
7Li system is given.
The characteristic features of the collapse of the ground state in trapped one-component attractive Bose-Einstein condensates are studied by applying the catastrophe theory. From numerically obtained stable and unstable solutions of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, we derive the catastrophe function defining the stability of the stationary points on the Gross-Pitaevskii energy functional. The bifurcation diagram and the universal scaling laws stemming from the catastrophe function show quantitative agreement with the numerical results.
An effective Hamiltonian for the Bose subsystem for the mixture of ultracold atomic clouds of bosons and fermions is obtained by integrating out the fermion degrees of freedom. Using the effective Hamiltonian, a collapse of the trapped boson-fermion mixture due to the boson-fermion attractive interaction without and in the presence of the quantized vortices is studied in the framework of variational Bose wave function and Thomas-Fermi approximation. The properties of the
87Rb and
40K mixture are analyzed quantitatively. The critical number of bosons for the collapse transition is estimated without and in the presence of the vortices as a function of the fermion number. It is shown that the critical number of bosons increases in the presence of the vortex. The vortex critical velocities are calculated as functions of the numbers of bosons and fermions.
We identify all possible classes of solutions for two-component Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) within the Thomas-Fermi (TF) approximation and check these results against numerical simulations of the coupled Gross-Pitaevskii equations (GPEs). We find that they can be divided into two general categories. The first class contains solutions with a region of overlap between the components. The other class consists of non-overlapping wavefunctions and also contains solutions that do not possess the symmetry of the trap. The chemical potential and average energy can be found for both classes within the TF approximation by solving a set of coupled algebraic equations representing the normalization conditions for each component. A ground state minimizing the energy (within both classes of states) is found for a given set of parameters characterizing the scattering length and confining potential. In the TF approximation, the ground state always shares the symmetry of the trap. However, a full numerical solution of the coupled GPEs, incorporating the kinetic energy of the BEC atoms, can sometimes select a broken-symmetry state as the ground state of the system. We also investigate effects of finite-range interactions on the structure of the ground state.
We study the spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) of a superfluid Bose-Fermi (BF) mixture in a double-well potential (DWP). The mixture is described by the Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE) for the bosons, coupled to an equation for the order parameter of the Fermi superfluid, which is derived from the respective density functional in the unitarity limit (a similar model applies to the BCS regime, too). Straightforward SSB in the degenerate Fermi gas loaded into a DWP is impossible, as it requires an attractive self-interaction, and the intrinsic nonlinearity in the Fermi gas is repulsive. Nonetheless, we demonstrate that the symmetry breaking is possible in the mixture with attraction between fermions and bosons, like
40K and
87Rb. Numerical results are represented by dependencies of asymmetry parameters for both components on particle numbers of the mixture,
NF and
NB, and by phase diagrams in the
(NF,NB) plane, which displays regions of symmetric and asymmetric ground states. The dynamical picture of the SSB, induced by a gradual transformation of the single-well potential into the DWP, is reported too. An analytical approximation is proposed for the case when the GPE for the boson wave function may be treated by means of the Thomas-Fermi (TF) approximation. Under a special linear relationship between
NF and
NB, the TF approximation allows us to reduce the model to a single equation for the fermionic function, which includes competing repulsive and attractive nonlinear terms. The latter one directly displays the mechanism of the generation of the effective attraction in the Fermi superfluid, mediated by the bosonic component of the mixture.