Anisotropy-driven transition from collisionless to collisional regime in the dipolar modes of a trapped gaseous mixture

Abstract

We evaluate the dipolar oscillations of a harmonically trapped fermion gas containing thermal bosonic impurities as a function of the anisotropy of the trap, from the numerical solution of the Vlasov-Landau equations for the one-body phase-space distribution functions. Starting from a situation in which the two components of the gaseous mixture perform almost independent oscillations inside a spherical trap, we demonstrate that different collision behaviors arise for oscillations in different directions as the trap is deformed into an elongated cigar-like shape. An increase in the anisotropy of the confinement thus suffices to drive a transition of dipolar modes from a collisionless to a collisional regime.