Molecular Bose-Einstein condensation in a Bose gas with a wide Feshbach resonance at finite temperatures

TL;DR

This paper investigates the finite-temperature behavior of molecular Bose-Einstein condensation in a Bose gas with a wide Feshbach resonance, revealing stability conditions and excitation properties through a mean-field approach.

Contribution

It introduces a self-consistent mean-field framework to analyze molecular BEC, including excitation spectra and stability near Feshbach resonances at finite temperatures.

Findings

Atomic excitation is gapped in the molecular-BEC state.

Molecular excitation remains gapless.

System stability depends on scattering length and temperature.

Abstract

Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of Feshbach molecules in a homogeneous Bose gas is studied at finite temperatures in a single-channel mean-field approach where the Hartree-Fock energy and pairing gap are determined self-consistently. In the molecular-BEC state, the atomic excitation is gapped and the molecular excitation is gapless. The binding energy of Feshbach molecules is shifted from the vacuum value due to many-body effect. When the scattering length $a_s$ of atoms is negative, the system is subject to mechanical collapse due to negative compressibility. The system is stable in most regions with positive scattering lengths. However at low temperatures near the resonance, the molecular-BEC state vanishes, and the coherent mixture of atomic and molecular BEC is subject to mechanical collapse.