Structure and stability of trapped atomic boson-fermion mixtures

TL;DR

This paper investigates the structure, stability, and phase behavior of trapped boson-fermion atomic mixtures at zero temperature, highlighting the effects of interactions and identifying critical conditions for collapse and separation.

Contribution

It introduces a modified Gross-Pitaevskii framework that self-consistently includes fermionic mean-field effects, providing new insights into mixture stability and phase diagrams.

Findings

Critical particle numbers for collapse due to attractive interactions.

Conditions for spatial component separation.

Complex phase diagram influenced by boson-boson and boson-fermion interactions.

Abstract

The structure of binary mixtures of bosonic and fermionic atoms in an external trapping potential at zero temperature is studied on the basis of a modified Gross-Pitaevskii equation for the bosonic component which self-consistently includes the mean-field interaction generated by the fermionic cloud. The density of the fermionic component is described within the Thomas-Fermi approximation. The influence of the boson-boson and the boson-fermion s-wave interaction on the density profiles and the stability of the mixture is investigated systematically. Critical particle numbers for the mean-field collapse caused either by attractive boson-boson or by attractive boson-fermion interactions and for the onset of spatial component separation are discussed. It is shown that the interplay between the boson-boson and the boson-fermion interaction generates a rich and complex phase diagram. Finally, the specific properties and prospects of the boson-fermion mixtures available in present experiments are addressed.