The existence of quantum droplets in binary Bose-Einstein condensate mixtures rely on beyondmean field effects, competing with mean-field effects. Interestingly, the beyond-mean field effect is changing from repulsive in 3D to attractive in 1D leading to drastically different behaviors. We study in detail the crossover between these two regimes in a quasi-1D regime where the radial wavefunction is frozen. Quantum droplets exist for all values and sign of the mean-field interaction. We find that approaching the crossover is experimentally appealing as it reduces the relative importance of three-body losses and give realistic numbers for the realization of quantum droplet in the crossover, which would permit to test beyond-mean-field theories to an unprecedented precision.
We study a liquid quantum droplets in a mixture of two-component Bose-Einstein condensates under a variable confinement introduced along one or two spatial dimensions. Despite the atom-atom scattering has a three-dimensional character, discreetness of the available modes in the reduced dimension(s) strongly influences the zero-point energy -- the Lee-Huang-Yang term. In a weakly interaction limit, it is the leading correction to the mean-field energy at the crossover from three to two dimensions, or from three to one dimension. We analyze the properties of the droplets at the dimensional cross…
We investigate the formation of self-bound quantum droplets in a one-dimensional binary mixture of bosonic atoms, applying the method of numerical diagonalization of the full Hamiltonian. The excitation spectra and ground-state pair correlations signal the formation of a few-boson droplet when crossing the region of critical inter-species interactions. The self-binding affects the rotational excitations, displaying a change in the energy dispersion from negative curvature, associated with superfluidity in the many-body limit, to a nearly parabolic curvature indicative of rigid body rotation. W…
We systematically investigate the ground-state properties of self-bound droplets of quasi-two-dimensional binary Bose gases by using the Gaussian state theory. We find that quantum droplets consists two macroscopic squeezed phases and a macroscopic coherent phase. We map out the phase diagram and determine all phase boundaries via both numerical and nearly analytical methods. In particular, we find three easily accessible signatures for the quantum phases and the stablization mechanism of the self-bound droplets by precisely measuring their radial size. Our studies indicate that binary droplet…
While quantum fluctuations in binary mixtures of bosonic atoms with short-range interactions can lead to the formation of a self-bound droplet, for equal intra-component interactions but an unequal number of atoms in the two components, there is an excess part that cannot bind to the droplet. Imposing confinement, as here through periodic boundary conditions in a one-dimensional setting, the droplet becomes amalgamated with a residual condensate. The rotational properties of this compound system reveal simultaneous rigid-body and superfluid behavior in the ground state and uncover that the res…
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 …
We study the beyond-mean-field corrections to the energy of a dipolar Bose gas confined to two dimensions by a box potential with dipoles oriented in plane. At a critical strength of the dipolar interaction the system becomes unstable on the mean field level. We find that the ground state of the gas is strongly influenced by the corrections, leading to formation of a self-bound droplet, in analogy to the free space case. Properties of the droplet state can be found by minimizing the extended Gross-Pitaevskii energy functional. In the limit of strong confinement we show analytically that the co…
We report a droplet to a soliton crossover by tuning the external confinement potential in a dilute Bose-Eienstein condensate by numerically solving the modified Gross-Pitaevskii equation. The testimony of such a crossover is presented via studying the fractional density of the condensate which smoothly migrates from being a flat-head curve at weak confinement to a bright soliton at strong confinement. Such a transition occurs across a region of the potential whose strength varies over an order of magnitude and thus should be fit to be termed as a crossover. We supplement our studies via explo…
In a joint experimental and theoretical effort, we report on the formation of a macro-droplet state in an ultracold bosonic gas of erbium atoms with strong dipolar interactions. By precise tuning of the s-wave scattering length below the so-called dipolar length, we observe a smooth crossover of the ground state from a dilute Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) to a dense macro-droplet state of more than $10^4$ atoms. Based on the study of collective excitations and loss features, we quantitative prove that quantum fluctuations stabilize the ultracold gas far beyond the instability threshold impose…
Ultradilute quantum droplets are intriguing new state of matter, in which the attractive mean-field force can be balanced by the repulsive force from quantum fluctuations to avoid collapse. Here, we present a microscopic theory of ultradilute quantum droplets in three-, one- and two-dimensional two-component Bose-Bose mixtures, by generalizing the conventional Bogoliubov theory to include the bosonic pairing arising from the interspecies attraction. Our pairing theory is fully equivalent to a variational approach and hence gives an upper bound for the energy of quantum droplets. In three dimen…
We study the properties of the Bose-Fermi mixture from the perspective of reaching a state of a self-bound quantum droplet. The variational analysis shows that the system exhibits bistability. For weak repulsion between bosons, one of the equilibrium states, smaller in size, spherically symmetric, and with negative energy, corresponds to quantum droplet, the other with always positive energy represents the elongated droplet-like state immersed in the sea of a fermionic cloud. For stronger repulsion between bosons the bifurcation is seized and only the former state is left. Now it represents an…
We study the collective modes of a binary Bose mixture across the soliton to droplet crossover in a quasi one dimensional waveguide with a beyond-mean-field equation of state and a variational Gaussian ansatz for the scalar bosonic field of the corresponding effective action. We observe a sharp difference in the collective modes in the two regimes. Within the soliton regime modes vary smoothly upon the variation of particle number or interaction strength. On the droplet side collective modes are inhibited by the emission of particles. This mechanism turns out to be dominant for a wide range of…
We use exact Quantum Monte Carlo techniques to study the properties of quantum droplets in two-component bosonic mixtures with contact interactions in one spatial dimension. We systematically study the surface tension, the density profile and the breathing mode as a function of the number of particles in the droplet and of the ratio of coupling strengths between intra-species repulsion and inter-species attraction. We find that deviations from the predictions of the generalized Gross-Pitaevskii equation are small in most cases of interest.
Quantum droplets have intrigued much attention recently in view of their successful observations in the ultracold homonuclear atoms. In this work, we demonstrate a new mechanism for the formation of quantum droplet in heteronuclear atomic systems, i.e., by applying the synthetic spin-orbit coupling(SOC). Take the Bose-Fermi mixture for example, we show that by imposing a Rashba SOC between the spin states of fermions, the greatly suppressed Fermi pressure can enable the formation of Bose-Fermi droplets even for very weak boson-fermion attractions, which are insufficient to bound a droplet if w…
Recently achieved two-component dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates open exciting possibilities for the study of mixtures of ultra-dilute quantum liquids. While non-dipolar self-bound mixtures are necessarily miscible with an approximately fixed ratio between the two densities, the density ratio for the dipolar case is free. As a result, self-bound dipolar mixtures present qualitatively novel and much richer physics, characterized by three possible ground-state phases: miscible, symmetric immiscible and asymmetric immiscible, which may in principle occur at any population imbalance. Self-bound i…
We study the formation of quantum droplets in the mixture of a single-component Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), and a two-species Fermi superfluid across a wide Feshbach resonance. With repulsive boson-boson and attractive boson-fermion interactions, we show that quantum droplets can be stabilized by attractive fermion-fermion interactions in the Bardeen-Cooper-Schieffer (BCS) side of the resonance, and can also exist in deep BEC regime under weak boson-fermion interactions. We map out the phase diagram for stable droplets with respect to the boson-boson and boson-fermion interactions, and dis…
We systematically investigate the properties of three-dimensional dipolar binary Bose mixture at low temperatures. A set of coupled self-consistent equations of motion are derived for the two condensates. In the homogeneous case, useful analytical formulas for the condensate depletion, the anomalous density, the ground-state energy, and the equation of state are obtained. The theory is extended to the inhomogeneous case and the importance of the inhomogeneity is highlighted. Our results open up a new avenue for studying dipolar mixture droplets. Impacts of the dipole-dipole interaction on the …
Quantum droplets have been realized in experiments on binary boson mixtures and dipolar Bose gases. In these systems, the mean-field energy of the Bose-Einstein condensation is attractive, and the repulsive Lee-Huang-Yang energy is crucial for stability. The Bogoliubov theory incorrectly predicts that the phonon mode is dynamically unstable in the long-wavelength limit. In this work, we go beyond the Bogoliubov theory to study how the phonon mode is stabilized in the quantum droplet of a binary boson mixture. Similar to Beliaev's approach to a single-component Bose gas, we compute higher-order…
We systematically study the effects of higher-order quantum and thermal fluctuations on the stabilization of self-bound droplets in Bose mixtures employing the time-dependent Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov theory. We calculate the ground-state energy, the droplet equilibrium density, the depletion and anomalous density of the droplets as well as the critical temperature as a function of the relevant parameters. Our findings are compared with previous analytical predictions and diffusion Monte Carlo simulations. We employ our theory together with the local density approximation for quantum and thermal…
We study the equilibrium properties of self-bound droplets in two-dimensional Bose mixtures employing the time-dependent Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov theory. This theory allows one to understand both the many-body and temperature effects beyond the Lee-Huang-Yang description. We calculate higher-order corrections to the excitations, the sound velocity, and the energy of the droplet. Our results for the ground-state energy are compared with the diffusion Monte Carlo data and good agreement is found. The behavior of the depletion and anomalous density of the droplet is also discussed. At finite tempe…
Self-bound quantum droplets are a newly discovered phase in the context of ultracold atoms. In this work we report their experimental realization following the original proposal by Petrov [Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 155302 (2015)], using an attractive bosonic mixture. In this system spherical droplets form due to the balance of competing attractive and repulsive forces, provided by the mean-field energy close to the collapse threshold and the first-order correction due to quantum fluctuations. Thanks to an optical levitating potential with negligible residual confinement we observe self-bound dropl…
We have theoretically investigated the structure of spinning self-bound droplets made of $^{41}$K-$^{87}$Rb Bose mixture by solving the Gross-Pitaevskii equation including beyond-mean-field correction in the Lee-Huang-Yang form. The structure and energetics of vortex formation in the self-bound mixture have been elucidated, showing that the formation of linear vortices in the heavier species is energetically favoured over other configurations. A fake (partially filled) core develops as a consequence in the other species, resulting in a hole which might be imaged in experiments. The interplay b…
We demonstrate the existence of quantum droplets in two-component one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard chains. The droplets exist for any strength of repulsive intra-species interactions provided they are balanced by comparable attractive inter-species interactions. The ground-state phase diagram is presented and the different phases are characterized by examining the density profile and off-diagonal one- and two-body correlation functions. A rich variety of phases is found, including atomic superfluid gases, atomic superfluid droplets, pair superfluid droplets, pair superfluid gases and a Mott-insula…
We investigate the ground state of a few-body Bose-Fermi mixture in a one-dimensional harmonic trap with varying interaction strengths and mass ratio. A bunching-antibunching crossover of the bosonic species for increasing interspecies' repulsion is observed within our fully correlated \textit{ab~initio} studies. Interestingly, this crossover is suppressed if the bosonic repulsion exceeds a critical value which strongly depends on the mass ratio. In order to unveil the physical origin of this crossover, we employ different levels of approximations: while a species mean-field approach can accou…
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 interacti…
We study an impurity immersed in the mixture of Bose ultracold gases in the regime where a quantum droplet exists. The quasi-one-dimensional geometry is considered. We find an effective attractive potential that acts by the quantum droplet onto the impurity. The bound states of the impurity in this potential are investigated. These impurity bound states can provide potential probes for the presence of quantum fluctuations effects on the droplet properties. In the case of strong impurity-BEC coupling, we study the properties of the nonlinear local modes on the impurity induced by the quantum fl…
Quantum droplets are small clusters of atoms self-bound by the balance of attractive and repulsive forces. Here we report on the observation of a novel type of droplets, solely stabilized by contact interactions in a mixture of two Bose-Einstein condensates. We demonstrate that they are several orders of magnitude more dilute than liquid helium by directly measuring their size and density via in situ imaging. Moreover, by comparison to a single-component condensate, we show that quantum many-body effects stabilize them against collapse. We observe that droplets require a minimum atom number to…
Attractive Bose-Einstein condensates can host two types of macroscopic self-bound states of different nature: bright solitons and quantum liquid droplets. Here, we investigate the connection between them with a Bose-Bose mixture confined in an optical waveguide. We develop a simple theoretical model to show that, depending on atom number and interaction strength, solitons and droplets can be smoothly connected or remain distinct states coexisting only in a bi-stable region. We experimentally measure their spin composition, extract their density for a broad range of parameters and map out the b…
The droplet crystal phase of a symmetric binary mixture of Rydberg-blockaded dipolar Bose gases is studied by computer simulation. At high temperature each droplet comprises on average equal numbers of particles of either component, but the two components demix below the supersolid transition temperature, i.e., droplets mostly consist of particles of one component. Droplets consisting of the same component will also favor clustering. Demixing is driven by quantum tunnelling of particles across droplets over the system, and does not take place in a non-superfluid crystal. This effect should be …
An ultradilute quantum droplet is a self-bound liquid-like state recently observed in ultracold Bose-Einstein condensates. In all previous theoretical studies, it is described by a phenomenological low-energy effective theory, termed as the extended Gross\textendash Pitaevskii equation. Here, we microscopically derive the Gross\textendash Pitaevskii equation for the condensate and also for a pairing field in an inhomogeneous quantum droplet realized by Bose-Bose mixtures with attractive inter-species interaction. We show that the inclusion of the pairing field is essential, in order to have a …
We theoretically investigate the finite-temperature structure and collective excitations of a self-bound ultradilute Bose droplet in a flat space realized in a binary Bose mixture with attractive inter-species interactions on the verge of mean-field collapse. As the droplet formation relies critically on the repulsive force provided by Lee-Huang-Yang quantum fluctuations, which can be easily compensated by thermal fluctuations, we find a significant temperature effect in the density distribution and collective excitation spectrum of the Bose droplet. A finite-temperature phase diagram as a fun…
We study the properties of self-bound liquid droplets of three-dimensional Bose mixtures in a weak random potential with Gaussian correlation function at both zero and finite temperatures. Using the Bogoliubov theory, we derive useful formulas for the ground-state energy, the equilibrium density, the depletion, and the anomalous density of the droplet. The quantum fluctuation induced by the disorder known as the glassy fraction is also systematically computed. At finite temperature, we calculate the free energy, the thermal equilibrium density, and the critical temperature in terms of the diso…
We show that a two-component mixture of a few repulsively interacting ultracold atoms in a one-dimensional trap possesses very different quantum regimes and that the crossover between them can be induced by tuning the interactions in one of the species. In the composite fermionization regime, where the interactions between both components are large, none of the species show large occupation of any natural orbital. Our results show that by increasing the interaction in one of the species, one can reach the phase-separated regime. In this regime, the weakly interacting component stays at the cen…
Self-bound quantum droplets form when the mean-field tendency of the gas to collapse is stabilized by the effectively repulsive beyond mean-field fluctuations. The beyond mean-field effects depend on Rabi-frequency $ω_R$ and quadratic Zeeman effect $q$ for the Rabi-coupled Bose mixtures and the spinor gases, respectively. The effects of varying $ω_R$ and $q$ on the quantum droplet have recently been examined for unpolarized Rabi-coupled Bose mixture with zero detuning $δ= 0$ and unpolarized spinor gas with $\langle F_z \rangle=0$. In this paper, we theoretically explore the stability of the dr…
Laser induced transitions between internal states of atoms have been playing a fundamental role to manipulate atomic clouds for many decades. In absence of interactions each atom behaves independently and their coherent quantum dynamics is described by the Rabi model. Since the experimental observation of Bose condensation in dilute gases, static and dynamical properties of multicomponent quantum gases have been extensively investigated. Moreover, at very low temperatures quantum fluctuations crucially affect the equation of state of many-body systems. Here we study the effects of quantum fluc…
Formation Dynamics of Quantum Droplets for Homonuclear and Heteronuclear Mixtures
Instituto de Física, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul（南里奥格兰德联邦大学物理研究所）；Departamento de Psiquiatria, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul（南里奥格兰德联邦大学精神病学系）
In a binary quantum droplet, the interspecies attraction dominates over the intraspecies repulsions and the mean-field energy is unstable. The mechanical stability is restored by the repulsive Lee-Huang-Yang (LHY) energy [1]. In the Bogoliubov theory of the binary quantum droplet, there are two branches of gapless excitations. The lower branch describes the phonon excitation and its energy is imaginary in the long-wavelength limit, implying dynamical instability. Recently it is found that the phonon energy is renormalized by higher-order quantum fluctuations and the dynamical instability is re…
