Polaron bubble stabilised by medium-induced three-body interactions

Abstract

Mixing two kinds of particles that repel each other usually results in either a homogeneous mixture when the repulsion is weak, or a complete phase separation of the two kinds when their repulsion is too strong. It is shown however that there is an intermediate regime where the two kinds can coexist in their ground state as a bubble immersed in a gas of one kind. Such a situation is obtained by adding heavy repulsive impurities into a Bose-Einstein condensate. Above a certain strength of the mutual repulsion, a stable bubble of impurities and bosons can be formed, resulting from the equilibrium between the interactions induced by the bosons inside the bubble and the outside pressure from the surrounding bosons. At some particular strength, the effective interactions between the impurities consist of only three-body interactions. Finally, above a critical strength, the bosons are ejected from the bubble and the impurities collapse into a pure bubble of impurities. This phenomenon could be observed with an imbalanced mixture of ultra-cold atoms of different masses. Moreover, it appears possible to reach a regime where the impurities form a dense bubble of strongly-interacting particles.