Mean-field instability of trapped dilute boson-fermion mixtures

Abstract

The influence of boson-boson and boson-fermion interactions on the stability of a binary mixture of bosonic and fermionic atoms is investigated. The density profiles of the trapped mixture are obtained from direct numerical solution of a modified Gross-Pitaevskii equation that is self-consistently coupled to the mean-field generated by the interaction with the fermionic species. The fermions which in turn feel the mean-field created by the bosons are treated in Thomas-Fermi approximation. We study the effects of different combinations of signs of the boson-boson and the boson-fermion scattering lengths and determine explicit expressions for critical particle numbers as function of these scattering lengths.