Mean-field description of dynamical collapse of a fermionic condensate in a trapped boson-fermion mixture

TL;DR

This paper develops a mean-field dynamical model to simulate the collapse of a fermionic condensate in a boson-fermion mixture, successfully reproducing experimental observations and suggesting new experimental approaches.

Contribution

It introduces a time-dependent mean-field-hydrodynamic model that explains stationary states and collapse dynamics of boson-fermion condensates, aligning with experimental data.

Findings

The model accurately reproduces the stationary condensate sizes.

It qualitatively matches the collapse dynamics observed experimentally.

The study proposes new experiments using Feshbach resonances.

Abstract

We suggest a time-dependent dynamical mean-field-hydrodynamic model for the collapse of a trapped boson-fermion condensate and perform numerical simulation based on it to understand some aspects of the experiment by Modugno et al. [Science 297, 2240 (2002)] on the collapse of the fermionic condensate in the 40K-87Rb mixture. We show that the mean-field model explains the formation of a stationary boson-fermion condensate at zero temparature with relative sizes compatible with experiment. This model is also found to yield a faithful representation of the collapse dynamics in qualitative agreement with experiment. In particular we consider the collapse of the fermionic condensate associated with (a) an increase of the number of bosonic atoms as in the experiment and (b) an increase of the attractive boson-fermion interaction using a Feshbach resonance. Suggestion for experiments of fermionic collapse using a Feshbach resonance is made.