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We report on the production of a $^{41}$K-$^{87}$Rb dual-species Bose-Einstein condensate with tunable interspecies interaction and we study the mixture in the attractive regime, i.e. for negative values of the interspecies scattering length $a_{12}$. The binary condensate is prepared in the ground state and confined in a pure optical trap. We exploit Feshbach resonances for tuning the value of $a_{12}$. After compensating the gravitational sag between the two species with a magnetic field gradient, we drive the mixture into the attractive regime. We let the system to evolve both in free space and in an optical waveguide. In both geometries, for strong attractive interactions, we observe the formation of self-bound states, recognizable as quantum droplets. Our findings prove that robust, long-lived droplet states can be realized in attractive two-species mixtures, despite the two atomic components may experience different potentials.
We study harmonically trapped two-species Bose-Einstein condensates within the Gross-Pitaevskii formalism. By invoking the Thomas-Fermi approximation, we derive an analytical solution for the miscible ground state in a particular region of the systems parameter space. This solution furnishes a simple formula for determining the relative strength of the interspecies interaction from a measurement of the density distribution of only one of the two species. Accompanying numerical simulations confirm its accuracy for sufficiently large numbers of condensed particles. The introduced formula provides a condensate-based scheme that complements the typical experimental methods of evaluating interspecies scattering lengths from collisional measurements on thermal samples.
We report on the production of a 41K-87Rb dual-species Bose-Einstein condensate in a hybrid trap, consisting of a magnetic quadrupole and an optical dipole potential. After loading both atomic species in the trap, we cool down 87Rb first by magnetic and then by optical evaporation, while 41K is sympathetically cooled by elastic collisions with 87Rb. We eventually produce two-component condensates with more than 10^5 atoms and tunable species population imbalance. We observe the immiscibility of the quantum mixture by measuring the density profile of each species after releasing them from the trap.
We produce Bose-Einstein condensates of two different species, $^{87}$Rb and $^{41}$K, in an optical dipole trap in proximity of interspecies Feshbach resonances. We discover and characterize two Feshbach resonances, located around 35 and 79 G, by observing the three-body losses and the elastic cross-section. The narrower resonance is exploited to create a double species condensate with tunable interactions. Our system opens the way to the exploration of double species Mott insulators and, more in general, of the quantum phase diagram of the two species Bose-Hubbard model.
We probe the collective dynamics of a quantum degenerate Bose-Bose mixture of Cs and $^{174}$Yb with attractive interspecies interactions. Specifically, we excite vertical center of mass oscillations of the Cs condensate, and observe significant damping for the Cs dipole mode, due to the rapid transfer of energy to the larger Yb component, and the ensuing acoustic dissipation. Numerical simulations based on coupled Gross-Pitaevskii equations provide excellent agreement, and additionally reveal the possibility of late-time revivals (beating) which are found to be highly sensitive to the Cs and Yb atom number combinations. By further tuning the interaction strength of Cs using a broad Feshbach resonance, we explore the stability of the degenerate mixture, and observe collapse of the Cs condensate mediated by the attractive Cs-Yb interaction when $a_{mathrm{Cs}}<50 , a_0$, well above the single-species collapse threshold, in good agreement with simulations.
We study the dynamics of a soliton-impurity system modeled in terms of a binary Bose-Einstein condensate. This is achieved by `switching off one of the two self-interaction scattering lengths, giving a two component system where the second component is trapped entirely by the presence of the first component. It is shown that this system possesses rich dynamics, including the identification of unusual `weak dimers that appear close to the zero inter-component scattering length. It is further found that this system supports quasi-stable trimers in regimes where the equivalent single-component gas does not, which is attributed to the presence of the impurity atoms which can dynamically tunnel between the solitons, and maintain the required phase differences that support the trimer state.