Quantum Mechanical Stabilization of a Collapsing Bose-Bose Mixture

Abstract

According to the mean-field theory a condensed Bose-Bose mixture collapses when the interspecies attraction becomes stronger than the geometrical average of the intraspecies repulsions, $g_{12}^2>g_{11} g_{22}$. We show that instead of collapsing such a mixture gets into a dilute liquid-like droplet state stabilized by quantum fluctuations thus providing a direct manifestation of beyond mean-field effects. We study various properties of the droplet and find, in particular, that in a wide range of parameters its excitation spectrum lies entirely above the particle emission threshold. The droplet thus automatically evaporates itself to zero temperature, the property potentially interesting by itself and from the viewpoint of sympathetic cooling of other systems.