Contributor info: Prof. Mariusz Gajda

Debraj Rakshit, Tomasz Karpiuk, Mirosław Brewczyk, Mariusz Gajda

SciPost Phys. 6, 079 (2019) · published 28 June 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We study the stability of a zero temperature mixture of attractively interacting degenerate bosons and spin-polarized fermions in the absence of confinement. We demonstrate that higher order corrections to the standard mean-field energy can lead to a formation of Bose-Fermi liquid droplets -- self-bound systems in three-dimensional space. The stability analysis of the homogeneous case is supported by numerical simulations of finite systems by explicit inclusion of surface effects. We discuss the experimental feasibility of formation of quantum droplets and indicate the main obstacle -- inelastic three-body collisions.