Stability of trapped degenerate dipolar Bose and Fermi gases

TL;DR

This paper investigates the stability conditions of trapped degenerate dipolar Bose and Fermi gases with cylindrical symmetry, revealing the critical interaction strengths and the effects of anisotropic dipolar interactions on collapse and stability.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of stability thresholds for dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates and Fermi gases, including numerical and variational methods, and estimates maximum particle numbers.

Findings

Stability depends on dipolar interaction strength and geometry.

Disk-shaped bosonic condensates can be stabilized by dipolar repulsion.

Strong dipolar interactions can lead to collapse in disk-shaped BECs.

Abstract

Trapped degenerate dipolar Bose and Fermi gases of cylindrical symmetry with the polarization vector along the symmetry axis are only stable for the strength of dipolar interaction below a critical value. In the case of bosons, the stability of such a dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is investigated for different strengths of contact and dipolar interactions using variational approximation and numerical solution of a mean-field model. In the disk shape, with the polarization vector perpendicular to the plane of the disk, the atoms experience an overall dipolar repulsion and this fact should contribute to the stability. However, a complete numerical solution of the dynamics leads to the collapse of a strongly disk-shaped dipolar BEC due to the long-range anisotropic dipolar interaction. In the case of fermions, the stability of a trapped single-component degenerate dipolar Fermi gas is studied including the Hartree-Fock exchange and Brueckner-Goldstone correlation energies in the local density approximation valid for a large number of atoms. Estimates for the maximum allowed number of polar Bose and Fermi molecules in BEC and degenerate Fermi gas are given.