We show that in dilute boson-fermion mixtures with fermions in two internal states, even when the bare fermion-fermion interaction is repulsive, the exchange of density fluctuations of the Bose condensate may lead to an effective fermion-fermion attraction, and thus to a Cooper instability in the s-wave channel. We give a simple condition to know when this is going to happen, and an analytic expression for the associated
Tc in the most important limit where the phonon branch of the Bogoliubov excitation spectrum of the bosons is important. We find a
Tc of the same order as for a pure Fermi gas with bare attraction.
We investigate the properties of a dilute boson-fermion mixture at zero temperature. The ground-state energy of the system is calculated to second order in the Bose-Fermi coupling constant. The Green's function formalism is applied to obtain results for the effect of Bose-Fermi interactions on the spectrum of phonon excitations, the momentum distribution, the condensate fraction, and the superfluid density of the bosonic component. A quantitative discussion of these effects is presented in the case of mixtures with attractive interspecies interaction.
We discuss bosonic models with a moat spectrum, where in momentum space the minimum of the dispersion relation is on a sphere of nonzero radius. For spinless bosons with
O(N) symmetry, we emphasize the essential difference between
N=2 and
N>2. When
N=2, there are two phase transitions: at zero temperature, a transition to a state with Bose condensation, and at nonzero temperature, a transition to a spatially inhomogeneous state. When
N>2, previous analysis suggests that a mass gap is generated dynamically at any temperature. In condensed matter, a moat spectrum is important for spin-orbit-coupled bosons. For cold nuclear or quarkyonic matter, we suggest that the transport properties, such as neutrino emission, are dominated by the phonons related to a moat spectrum; also, that at least in the quarkyonic phase the nucleons may be a non-Fermi liquid.