Quasiparticle lifetime in a mixture of Bose and Fermi superfluids

Beliaev Damping of a Spin-Orbit-Coupled Bose-Einstein Condensate

Beliaev damping provides a fundamental mechanism for dissipation of quasiparticles. Previous research has shown that the two-component internal degrees of freedom has no nontrivial effect on Beliaev damping. Here we provide the first example where the spinor nature of Bose gases can manifest itself in the Beliaev damping by way of spin-obit coupling. We identify novel features of the Beliaev decay rate due to spin-orbit coupling; in particular, it shows an explicit dependence on the spin-density interaction and diverges at the interaction-modified phase boundary between the zero-momentum and plane wave phases. This represents a manifestation of the effect of spin-orbit coupling in the beyond-mean-field regime, which by breaking Galilean invariance couples excitations in the density and spin channels. We further show that the measurement of the Beliaev damping rate is experimentally feasible through the measurement of spin polarizability susceptibility, which has been already achieved in spin-orbit-coupled Bose gases.

Absence of Landau damping in driven three-component Bose-Einstein condensate in optical lattices

We explore the quantum many-body physics of a three-component Bose-Einstein condensate in an optical lattice driven by laser fields in V and Λ configurations. We obtain exact analytical expressions for the energy spectrum and amplitudes of elementary excitations, and discover symmetries among them. We demonstrate that the applied laser fields induce a gap in the otherwise gapless Bogoliubov spectrum. We find that Landau damping of the collective modes above the energy of the gap is carried by laser-induced roton modes and is considerably suppressed compared to the phonon-mediated damping endemic to undriven scalar condensates

Vortex Lattices in the Bose-Fermi Superfluid Mixture

In this Letter we show that the vortex lattice structure in the Bose-Fermi superfluid mixture can undergo a sequence of structure transitions when the Fermi superfluid is tuned from the BCS regime to the BEC regime. This is due to the difference in the vortex core structure of a Fermi superfluid in the BCS regime and in the BEC regime. In the BCS regime the vortex core is nearly filled, while the density at the vortex core gradually decreases until it empties out in the BEC regime. Therefore, with the density-density interaction between the Bose and the Fermi superfluids, interaction between the two sets of vortex lattices gets stronger in the BEC regime, which yields the structure transition of vortex lattices. In view of the recent realization of this superfluid mixture and vortices therein, our theoretical predication can be verified experimentally in the near future.

Two-Element Mixture of Bose and Fermi Superfluids

We report on the production of a stable mixture of bosonic and fermionic superfluids composed of the elements ^{174}Yb and ^{6}Li which feature a strong mismatch in mass and distinct electronic properties. We demonstrate elastic coupling between the superfluids by observing the shift in dipole oscillation frequency of the bosonic component due to the presence of the fermions. The measured magnitude of the shift is consistent with a mean-field model and its direction determines the previously unknown sign of the interspecies scattering length to be positive. We also observe the exchange of angular momentum between the superfluids from the excitation of a scissors mode in the bosonic component through interspecies interactions. We explain this observation using an analytical model based on superfluid hydrodynamics.

Critical Velocity and Dissipation of an Ultracold Bose-Fermi Counterflow

We study the dynamics of counterflowing bosonic and fermionic lithium atoms. First, by tuning the interaction strength we measure the critical velocity v(c) of the system in the BEC-BCS crossover in the low temperature regime and we compare it to the recent prediction of Castin et al., C. R. Phys. 16, 241 (2015). Second, raising the temperature of the mixture slightly above the superfluid transitions reveals an unexpected phase locking of the oscillations of the clouds induced by dissipation.