Fermi1

Interacting mixtures of bosons and fermions are ubiquitous in nature. They form the backbone of the standard model of physics, provide a framework for understanding quantum materials such as unconventional superconductors and two-dimensional electronic systems, and are of technological importance in 3He/4He dilution refrigerators. Bose-Fermi mixtures are predicted to exhibit an intricate phase diagram featuring coexisting liquids, supersolids, composite fermions, coupled superfluids, and quantum phase transitions in between. However, their coupled thermodynamics and collective behavior challenge our understanding, in particular for strong boson-fermion interactions. Clean realizations of fully controllable systems are scarce. Ultracold atomic gases offer an ideal platform to experimentally investigate Bose-Fermi mixtures, as the species concentration and interaction strengths can be freely tuned. Here, we study the collective oscillations of a spin-polarized Fermi gas immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) as a function of the boson-fermion interaction strength and temperature. Remarkably, for strong interspecies interactions the fermionic collective excitations evolve to perfectly mimic the bosonic superfluid collective modes, and fermion flow becomes dissipationless. With increasing number of thermal excitations in the Bose gas, the fermions’ dynamics exhibit a crossover from the collisionless to the hydrodynamic regime, reminiscent of the emergence of hydrodynamics in two-dimensional electron fluids. Our findings open the door towards understanding non-equilibrium dynamics of strongly interacting Bose-Fermi mixtures.

The emergence of quasiparticles in strongly interacting matter represents one of the cornerstones of modern physics. However, when different phases of matter compete near a quantum critical point, the very existence of quasiparticles comes under question. Here we create Bose polarons near quantum criticality by immersing atomic impurities in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with near-resonant interactions. Using locally-resolved radiofrequency spectroscopy, we probe the energy, spectral width, and short-range correlations of the impurities as a function of temperature. Far below the superfluid critical temperature, the impurities form well-defined quasiparticles. However, their inverse lifetime, given by their spectral width, is observed to increase linearly with temperature, a hallmark of quantum critical behavior. Close to the BEC critical temperature, the spectral width exceeds the binding energy of the impurities, signaling a breakdown of the quasiparticle picture near quantum criticality.

We demonstrate microwave dressing on ultracold, fermionic 23Na40K ground-state molecules and observe resonant dipolar collisions with cross sections exceeding three times the s-wave unitarity limit. The origin of these collisions is the resonant alignment of the approaching molecules’ dipoles along the intermolecular axis, which leads to strong attraction. We explain our observations with a conceptually simple two-state picture based on the Condon approximation. Furthermore, we perform coupled-channels calculations that agree well with the experimentally observed collision rates. While collisions are observed here as laser-induced loss, microwave dressing on chemically stable molecules trapped in box potentials may enable the creation of strongly interacting dipolar gases of molecules.