A new class of quantum mechanical liquids is stabilized by an elegant mechanism that allows them to exist despite being orders of magnitude thinner than air.
Quantum droplets are small clusters of atoms self-bound by the balance of attractive and repulsive forces. Here, we report on the observation of droplets solely stabilized by contact interactions in a mixture of two Bose-Einstein condensates. We demonstrate that they are several orders of magnitude more dilute than liquid helium by directly measuring their size and density via in situ imaging. We show that the droplets are stablized against collapse by quantum fluctuations and that they require a minimum atom number to be stable. Below that number, quantum pressure drives a liquid-to-gas transition that we map out as a function of interaction strength. These ultradilute isotropic liquids remain weakly interacting and constitute an ideal platform to benchmark quantum many-body theories.
We show that ultradilute quantum liquids can be formed with ultracold bosonic dipolar atoms in a bilayer geometry. Contrary to previous realizations of ultradilute liquids, there is no need for stabilizing the system with an additional repulsive short-range potential. The advantage of the proposed system is that dipolar interactions on their own are sufficient for creation of a self-bound state and no additional short-range potential is needed for the stabilization. We perform quantum Monte Carlo simulations and find a rich ground-state phase diagram that contains quantum phase transitions between liquid, solid, atomic gas, and molecular gas phases. The stabilization mechanism of the liquid phase is consistent with the microscopic scenario in which the effective dimer-dimer attraction is balanced by an effective three-dimer repulsion. The equilibrium density of the liquid, which is extremely small, can be controlled by the interlayer distance. From the equation of state, we extract the spinodal density, below which the homogeneous system breaks into droplets. Our results offer a new example of a two-dimensional interacting dipolar liquid in a clean and highly controllable setup.
We show that ultradilute quantum liquids can be formed with ultracold bosonic dipolar atoms in a bilayer geometry. Contrary to previous realizations of ultradilute liquids, there is no need for stabilizing the system with an additional repulsive short-range potential. The advantage of the proposed system is that dipolar interactions on their own are sufficient for creation of a self-bound state and no additional short-range potential is needed for the stabilization. We perform quantum Monte Carlo simulations and find a rich ground-state phase diagram that contains quantum phase transitions between liquid, solid, atomic gas, and molecular gas phases. The stabilization mechanism of the liquid phase is consistent with the microscopic scenario in which the effective dimer-dimer attraction is balanced by an effective three-dimer repulsion. The equilibrium density of the liquid, which is extremely small, can be controlled by the interlayer distance. From the equation of state, we extract the spinodal density, below which the homogeneous system breaks into droplets. Our results offer a new example of a two-dimensional interacting dipolar liquid in a clean and highly controllable setup.