Demixing in mesoscopic boson-fermion clouds inside cylindrical harmonic traps: Quantum phase diagram and role of temperature

Abstract

We use a semiclassical three-fluid model to evaluate the phenomena of spatial demixing in mesoscopic clouds of fermionic and bosonic atoms at high dilution under harmonic confinement. We assume repulsive boson-boson and boson-fermion interactions and include a bosonic thermal cloud at finite temperature T. The finite system size allows three different regimes for the equilibrium density profiles at T=0: a fully mixed state, a partially mixed state in which the overlap between bosons and fermions is decreasing, and a fully demixed state where the two clouds have zero overlap. We propose simple analytical rules for the two crossovers between the three regimes as functions of the system parameters and support these rules by extensive numerical calculations. A universal "phase diagram" is shown to be valid for the transition to the regime of full demixing, where we identify several exotic configurations in addition to simple ones consisting of a core of bosons enveloped by fermions and vice versa. With increasing temperature some exotic configurations are transformed into more symmetric ones, until demixing is ultimately lost. For very high values of the boson-fermion repulsion we also report demixing between the fermions and the thermally excited bosons.