Dark-Bright Solitons in a Superfluid Bose-Fermi Mixture

Abstract

The recent experimental realization of Bose-Fermi superfluid mixtures of dilute ultracold atomic gases has opened new perspectives in the study of quantum many-body systems. Depending on the values of the scattering lengths and the amount of bosons and fermions, a uniform Bose-Fermi mixture is predicted to exhibit a fully mixed phase, a fully separated phase or, in addition, a purely fermionic phase coexisting with a mixed phase. The occurrence of this intermediate configuration has interesting consequences when the system is nonuniform. In this work we theoretically investigate the case of solitonic solutions of coupled Bogoliubov-de Gennes and Gross-Pitaevskii equations for the fermionic and bosonic components, respectively. We show that, in the partially separated phase, a dark soliton in Fermi superfluid is accompanied by a broad bosonic component in the soliton, forming a dark-bright soliton which keeps full spatial coherence.