Atom-Dimer Scattering and Stability of Bose and Fermi Mixtures

Abstract

Motivated by a recent experiment by ENS group on the mixture of Bose and Fermi superfluids (arxiv:1404.2548), we investigate the effective scattering between a bosonic atom and a molecule(dimer) of fermion atoms. It is found that the mean-field prediction of the atom-dimer scattering length ($a_{ad}$), as simply given by the boson-fermion scattering length ($a_{bf}$), generically fails. Instead, $a_{ad}$ crucially depends on the ratio between $a_{bf}$ and $a_{ff}$ (the fermion-fermion scattering length), and in addition log-periodically depends on the three-body parameter. We identify the universal parameters in characterizing $a_{ad}$ for a wide range of $a_{ff}$ in the molecular side of the fermion-fermion Feshbach resonance, and further demonstrate that the atom-dimer many-body system can become unstable against either phase separation or collapse as tuning $a_{ff}$. Our results have some implications to the ENS experiment.