No Arabic abstract
We report on the formation of heteronuclear quantum droplets in an attractive bosonic mixture of 41K and 87Rb. We observe long-lived self-bound states, both in free space and in an optical waveguide. In the latter case, the dynamics under the effect of a species-dependent force confirms their bound nature. By tuning the interactions from the weakly to the strongly attractive regime, we study the transition from expanding to localized states, in both geometries. We compare the experimental results with beyond mean-field theory and we find a good agreement in the full range of explored interactions. Our findings open up the production of long-lived droplets with important implications for further research.
We report on the dynamical formation of self-bound quantum droplets in attractive mixtures of $^{39}$K atoms. Considering the experimental observations of Semeghini et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 235301 (2018), we perform numerical simulations to understand the relevant processes involved in the formation of a metastable droplet from an out-of-equilibrium mixture. We first analyze the so-called self-evaporation mechanism, where the droplet dissipates energy by releasing atoms, and then we consider the effects of losses due to three-body recombinations and to the balancing of populations in the mixture. We discuss the importance of these three mechanisms in the observed droplet dynamics and their implications for future experiments.
We theoretically investigate the self-evaporation dynamics of quantum droplets in a 41K-87Rb mixture, in free-space. The dynamical formation of the droplet and the effects related to the presence of three-body losses are analyzed by means of numerical simulations. We identify a regime of parameters allowing for the observation of the droplet self-evaporation in a feasible experimental setup.
We study the fate of an impurity in an ultracold heteronuclear Bose mixture, focusing on the experimentally relevant case of a $^{41}$K-$^{87}$Rb mixture, with the impurity in a $^{41}$K hyperfine state. Our work provides a comprehensive description of an impurity in a BEC mixture with contact interactions across its phase diagram. We present results for the miscible and immiscible regimes, as well as for the impurity in a self-bound quantum droplet. Here, varying the interactions, we find novel, exotic states where the impurity localizes either at the center or at the surface of the droplet.
Quantum fluctuations are the origin of genuine quantum many-body effects, and can be neglected in classical mean-field phenomena. Here we report on the observation of stable quantum droplets containing $sim$ 800 atoms which are expected to collapse at the mean-field level due to the essentially attractive interaction. By systematic measurements on individual droplets we demonstrate quantitatively that quantum fluctuations stabilize them against the mean-field collapse. We observe in addition interference of several droplets indicating that this stable many-body state is phase coherent.
Motivated by recent realizations of spin-1 NaRb mixtures in the experiments, here we investigate heteronuclear magnetism in the Mott-insulating regime. Different from the identical mixtures where the boson (fermion) statistics only admits even (odd) parity states from angular momentum composition, for heteronuclear atoms in principle all angular momentum states are allowed, which can give rise to new magnetic phases. Various magnetic phases can be developed over these degenerate spaces, however, the concrete symmetry breaking phases depend not only on the degree of degeneracy, but also the competitions from many-body interactions. We unveil these rich phases using the bosonic dynamical mean-field theory approach. These phases are characterized by various orders, including spontaneous magnetization order, spin magnitude order, singlet pairing order and nematic order, which may coexist, especially in the regime with odd parity. Finally we address the possible parameter regimes for observing these spin-ordered Mott phases.