Abstract Repulsive Bose–Einstein condensates, where short-range interaction is included up to the third order by the interaction radius, demonstrate the existence of bright solitons in a narrow interval of parameters. These solitons are studied here for the boson–fermion mixture, where spin-1/2 fermions are considered in the regime of full-spin polarization. The influence of fermions on bosonic bright solitons via the boson–fermion interaction is considered up to the third order by the interaction radius. Fermions themselves are considered within the hydrodynamic model, which includes the kinetic pressure-evolution equation. The interactions between fermions are also considered. The first order by the interaction radius makes a zero contribution to the Euler equation and the kinetic pressure evolution equation for fermions, but the third order by the interaction radius provides nonzero contributions to both equations. The repulsive (attractive) boson–fermion interaction leads to bright (dark) fermionic solitons.
We discuss the issue of measuring the mean position (center of mass) of a group of bosonic or fermionic quantum particles, including particle number fluctuations. We introduce a standard quantum limit for these measurements at ultralow temperatures, and discuss this limit in the context of both photons and ultracold atoms. In the case of non-interacting harmonically trapped fermions, we present evidence that the Pauli exclusion principle has a strongly beneficial effect, giving rise to a 1∕N scaling in the position standard deviation---as opposed to a 1∕N scaling for bosons. The difference between the actual mean-position fluctuation and this limit is evidence for quantum wave-packet spreading in the center of mass. This macroscopic quantum effect cannot be readily observed for noninteracting particles, due to classical pulse broadening. For this reason, we also study the evolution of photonic and matter-wave solitons, where classical dispersion is suppressed. In the photonic case, we show that the intrinsic quantum diffusion of the mean position can contribute significantly to uncertainties in soliton pulse arrival times. We also discuss ways in which the relatively long lifetimes of attractive bosons in matter-wave solitons may be used to demonstrate quantum interference between massive objects composed of thousands of particles.